


De profundis

by darcylindbergh



Category: Sherlock (TV), The Sixth Sense (1999)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Anyone and Everyone Could Be Dead, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Death, Dark Humor, Episode: s01e01 A Study in Pink, Ghosts, Irreverent Discussion of Death, Irreverent Discussion of Religion, M/M, Mentions of Suicide, Spooky stories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-23
Updated: 2017-12-22
Packaged: 2019-01-22 02:45:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 32,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12471724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darcylindbergh/pseuds/darcylindbergh
Summary: Sherlock Holmes sees dead people. Which, although not necessarily ideal, has mostly turned out to be fine.Or, it was, until one day he looks up, and sees John Watson.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Из глубины (De profundis)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12574320) by [Merla](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merla/pseuds/Merla)



> Warnings for admittedly irreverent and somewhat flippant discussion of death and suicide. Any and every character in this fic could be dead, so read with caution.
    
    
    I am the resurrection, and the life:
    he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; 
    and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. 
    
    John 11:25-26

*

Sherlock is twelve years old when he wakes up to another boy in his bed, dripping wet and soaking the sheets with the smell of chlorine, and he is so disoriented by it that at first he doesn’t realise he ought to be afraid.

“Get off,” Sherlock mumbles, sleepy and confused. “Go ‘way.”

“Help me,” says the boy.

Sherlock rolls over. “No, you’re all wet. Go away.”

The boy doesn’t go away. He sleeps in Sherlock’s bed another four nights, perpetually drenched and a little unsettling. Sherlock doesn’t mention him to anyone else. There’s something about him that makes Sherlock think he shouldn’t, something that makes Sherlock’s gaze want to slide away from looking at him, that makes Sherlock want to huddle with his back to the boy and not talk to him, like maybe if Sherlock couldn’t see him, he wouldn’t actually be there.

Then Sherlock picks up a page of his father’s discarded newspaper one morning over breakfast and discovers he _shouldn’t_ be there. _TRAGIC SWIM!_ the newsprint blares. _CHAMPION DEAD!_ There’s a picture of the boy underneath it, smiling and freckly and dry.

Sherlock studies the picture for a long moment, then abandons his breakfast and goes back to his room. “Did you know,” he asks the dripping boy, who is still sitting on Sherlock’s bed, “that you’re dead?”

“Not _just_ dead,” the boy says, rather crossly. “Murdered.”

Sherlock doesn’t think the boy looks very murdered. He just looks all wet. “Your picture was in the paper today. What’s your name?”

“Carl. Carl Powers.”

Carl stays with Sherlock for six weeks, sometimes insistent and loud and in the way, sometimes not quite all the way there at all: no more than a displacement of dust motes in the air, an inexplicable shadow in a spot of sunshine. Sherlock never does solve his murder, but eventually he gets the idea to send Carl’s mum a letter full of everything Carl wants to tell her, and he figures that must solve _something_ , because he never sees Carl again after that.

But after Carl, there’s more.

*

They’re everywhere, all the time.

This makes sense, Sherlock decides, very early on. Everyone dies at some point, obviously, so it makes sense that even if only a very small percentage of the dead manage to cling to the remnants of existence, there would still be a lot of them to see.

He learns there are rather a lot of ways to die, and some of them are horrible, but more of them are comfortingly ordinary: boring heart attacks and strokes and run-of-the-mill organ failures, moving people so smoothly from life to death that they don’t even notice. They could almost pass for the living, most of them—but for the blue tone under their skin and the hollowness of their eyes. But for the icy tingle that crawls up the back of Sherlock’s neck when he sees them, like a frigid breath blowing across his skin.

Sherlock sees them, but they don’t always see Sherlock.

They only see what they want to see, he learns, and they don’t want to see the little boy that looks back, or the pale teenager that looks away instead of looking _through,_ or the strung-out drug addict that hides his face and begs for them to disappear. They don’t want to see the blood that drips out of their hairlines or from under their cuffs. They don’t want to see the way time moves on without them.

Sherlock sees everything, though. He sees everything they don’t want to see and more, and when he emerges from the second round of rehab with the certain knowledge that stopping his own heart won’t stop him from _seeing_ , he spends a few days moping around Mycroft’s old bedroom, thinking about Carl Powers, and then he makes a decision.

He gets little cards printed with his name on them— _Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective_ —and goes to work.

Once they realise they’re dead, Sherlock learns, they can mostly see him just fine, and they seek him out the same way Carl did. Most of them even do it the same way his living clients do—via e-mail. _Mr Holmes,_ they say _, I know it sounds silly but I’m afraid I woke up this morning rather more dead than I was expecting to be._ But sometimes he’ll just get up in the mornings to find a bloody friar or a sheet-white lady in a hoop skirt waiting in his sitting room, and he never really does figure out how those ones find him. It’s not as though they’re looking up the website, after all.

In the end, it doesn’t really matter how they find him. What matters is that they do, and then Sherlock learns that if they can see him, they can _touch_ him.

And _then_ Sherlock really learns about being afraid.

Most of them, though, are just looking for the same thing anybody is looking for: answers. How did they die? Why are they still here? What’s _next,_ and most importantly, how do they get there?

Sherlock doesn’t know anything about what’s next, but he does what he can about the rest of it. He solves their murders. He finds their loved ones. He delivers their messages. He learns, stubborn and determined and strong-willed, to see them beyond their deaths. To see beyond the bruises and burns and atrophied limbs, and to see instead the plea in their eyes.

_Help me._

Sherlock tries. He can’t always, but he sees them, and he tries.

*

There are three dead people in Sherlock’s new sitting room, and they are driving him up the _wall_.

He didn’t really expect the move to have dislodged any of them; nothing so simple has ever worked at getting rid of the dead before. Still, they’re exhausting, and even more so because Sherlock hasn’t been able to do much for them. The first has been hanging around, mouth full of the vomit he had choked on as he died, since sometime in mid-October, when the press went wild over the sudden apparent suicide of a wealthy industrialist in an empty block of offices. He’d been joined a little more than a month later by a young man in a leather jacket, with wind-pink cheeks and damp hair and something Sherlock had thought he might recognise in the curve of his shoulders, and Sherlock had finally started looking for a bigger flat.

The last had shown up only yesterday, right as Sherlock was trying to get the last of his things into moving boxes: a woman with blonde hair and a sparkly black dress, who smells, in addition to the vomit, overwhelming like Sambuca, and who never stops crying.

Sherlock can see all of three of them; none of them can see each other.

They’re all supposedly suicides and all definitely linked, but Sherlock hasn’t got much more than that to go on, and it’s frustrating and irritating and _boring_. Not only are none of them able to speak around the vomit in their mouths—and Sherlock _loathes_ vomit—but the investigation is huge and ongoing and very, very private, and Lestrade won’t give Sherlock even a _whiff_ of information about it, leaving him with three unwanted flatmates and nothing to do about them.

So instead of unpacking his new flat, Sherlock spends the morning hacking into a security camera feed at New Scotland Yard, watching the report on Beth Davenport’s apparent suicide and texting reporters just to make Lestrade look like the idiot he is, but it comes to nothing. Lestrade doesn’t text him back, Beth Davenport doesn’t stop crying into his rug, and finally Sherlock gives it up as a bad job and instead raids his inbox for anything worthwhile.

“Don’t touch anything,” he tells the three of them as he puts on his coat and scarf. They blink up at him, mouths too full to speak. “And don’t bother Mrs Hudson. And _don’t_ follow me.”

He heads out to the morgue at Barts’ hospital. There, at least, all the dead people will be the way they’re meant to be: simply, serenely, and entirely dead.

*

Sherlock solves three cases in as many hours, and still can’t scratch the itch the suicides in his sitting room are causing. Not even railing against the body of a sixty-seven year old man with a riding crop (and with permission—the gentleman is still occupying his old office on the fourth floor, it turns out, though Sherlock admits he may have misunderstood the question) helps to alleviate the frustration. It just makes Sherlock’s shoulders sore.

He finally huffs his way out of the morgue and instead sits himself in front of a microscope, making himself disappear into the focus required by a sensitive test or two. He’s in the middle of sending a deliberately mystifying text to Lestrade when the door opens, and Sherlock very intentionally does not glance up—does not want to encourage the morgue’s pathologist any more than she apparently thought he already had.

“Sorry,” a man who is very much _not_ the lovestruck Molly Hooper says. “Has Mike Stamford been through here?”

Sherlock looks. It’s an unfamiliar man with an aluminium cane and irritation around the corners of his mouth: short blond hair, shot through with the suggestion of grey, crisp blue-checked shirt. Something military about his jaw, about the way he stands. “No,” Sherlock says, intrigued. Something tickles between his shoulder blades as he watches the man’s mouth twist in disappointment. “I’ve not seen him.”

“Never keeps his bloody phone on him,” the man gripes. “Thanks though.” He turns to leave.

“Does your phone have signal?” Sherlock asks suddenly. He feels like he’s not quite done _looking_ , yet, and isn’t sure why. The man turns back and Sherlock waves his own phone, and the irritation in the corners of the man’s eyes dissolves into something more tentative, something Sherlock doesn’t quite recognise. “I’m having a hard time getting it on mine.”

“Oh, um.” The man pulls a phone out of his pocket. “Yeah, I do. Do you need—?” He extends his hand, offering it up.

Sherlock doesn’t, but he says, “Thank you,” and rises from his stool to take it. The man’s hand is tan; the wrist, exposed a little less than half an inch from under the cuff, is not. Sherlock sends another mystifying text to Lestrade while the man politely looks away.

It’s odd, Sherlock thinks, watching him, that he doesn’t put his weight on the cane as he stands, even as he rubs one hand over the back of his neck. There’s a vague tremor in his fingers. He looks around with a sense of despondent nostalgia, as if the lab should be more familiar to him than it is and the fact that it isn’t is hurtful, somehow. Obviously not a patient, but too confident to be a student, lost in thought: lost in memories. A doctor, then, or a nurse at least, no longer working here at Barts but used to.

And: the haircut—the cane—the suntan—abroad but not sunbathing—psychosomatic injury: trauma—army personnel—killed in action— _dead_.

But just as quickly as the deduction blossomed, it twists, second-guesses itself: _no—not dead._ _Wait. Dead? Or not dead?_

Sherlock hands the mobile back, and something prickles along his skin at the ghost of contact, at two hands too close but not yet touching. It’s not the familiar cold he’s used to feeling on the back of his neck when he looks at a dead person, though. It sparks and pops like electricity, all the way down his spine, and he feels _heated_ , flushed even: unusual. He tilts his head and looks the man over again.

“John Watson,” the man volunteers, sticking out his hand.

Sherlock takes it. His hand is warm, but not warm: it could be just the typical cold hand of a doctor in the cool of the hospital, or it could be the first breath of death settling in over him. Sherlock’s brow furrows, uncertain, and he doesn’t quite manage to let go soon enough for his interest to go unnoticed. “Sherlock Holmes,” he returns, awkwardly. He might be staring.

If John Watson was killed in action, he realises, stomach sinking, Sherlock probably won’t be able to solve his murder. Too many variables to account for, too many secrets and too much anonymity. Unless there was a witness—but wait—no. The cane. _Wounded_ in action, but not killed: he had at least been treated long enough for some idiot to saddle him with that crutch.

Sherlock squints a little harder. John Watson stares back at him, his face beginning to close off a little with suspicion. The corners of his eyes are pinched, like he’s not used to looking directly at another person for more than a few seconds. The skin at the hinge of his jaw seems drawn, unnaturally tight, as if he’s been losing weight.

 _Already a suicide_ , Sherlock wonders, _or still suicidal? Which side of the fence are you on, John Watson?_

He doesn’t know. For the first time _ever_ , Sherlock doesn’t know.

And there’s—something else. The prickle of energy down Sherlock’s spine. The way John Watson is still allowing Sherlock to stare at him, the way he’s still staring back, instead of excusing himself. Sherlock feels distinctly _caught_ by the question of who and how and why and _what_ John Watson is, and he doesn’t want to walk away until he knows. Until he knows _everything._

The compulsion takes Sherlock by surprise, and he can’t stop himself from asking, “Afghanistan, or Iraq?”

“Afghanistan,” John says automatically, and then, catching himself, “Sorry, what?”

“Seen a lot of injuries then, Doctor? Violent deaths?”

Sherlock watches closely for any reaction, for any tell that might be a memory of John’s own death coming to the surface, but John’s expression doesn’t change at all. If anything, it hardens into place, the veneer of politeness suddenly stretched thin. “Who are you?” he asks.

Sherlock sidesteps the question; _he’s_ not the most interesting one in the room right now. “Bit of trouble, too, I bet?”

“Yes,” John says. His voice has gone tight with warning. “Of course. Enough for a lifetime.” _Enough to know how to lay you out right here, if I have to,_ he doesn’t say, but his grip on his cane has tightened and adjusted, readying to use it as a weapon if Sherlock turns out to be a complete creep.

Sherlock probably _is_ a complete creep, he thinks with a suppressed laugh, but not in the way John is anticipating. A half-smile fights its way onto his face at the sight before him: John Watson, steady on both feet and ready to take Sherlock’s out from under him, his hand no longer trembling around the cane’s handle. “I’m a consulting detective,” Sherlock explains. “When the police are out of their depths, which is always, they consult me. And, since they will no doubt have to do so again quite soon, I’m in need of an assistant.”

John’s thrown, but Sherlock can see him trying not to show it. “Who said anything about assistants?”

Down the hall, Sherlock hears the telltale sound of a door opening and closing, the dull clang of the push bar and the clatter as the door falls back to its frame. _Mike Stamford_ , he thinks, _come looking for John_ , and he’s startled by how much he does not want to see Mike Stamford and John Watson in the same room together. There’d be information there, in that interaction. Too much information: information Sherlock’s not sure he’s ready for.

 _Dead_ , he wonders again, _or alive?_

“I did, just now,” Sherlock says quickly, already moving. John watches intently as Sherlock twines his scarf back around his neck. “I’m in need of one, and now here you are, a doctor clearly just home from military service in Afghanistan, clearly out of work, nearly out of money, and desperate to get out of your bedsit: are you interested?”

He doesn’t need an assistant, not really, but that’s not the point. The door down the hall closed nearly ten seconds ago: Stamford will probably open the door to the lab within twenty or less. Sherlock slides into his coat, palms suddenly sweaty.

“Hang on, excuse me,” John starts, offense warring with fascination. “How did you—did Mike tell you about me?”

“Afraid I’ve got to dash,” Sherlock cuts off, brandishing his phone and slipping around John toward the door. “Emergency text, you understand. The police—anyway. Meet me tomorrow, seven o’clock. 221B Baker Street.” He grabs at the door handle, hopes blindly that Stamford isn’t standing directly on the other side of it already, and nearly sighs in relief when it opens to an empty corridor. He looks back at John one more time, and, a bit wildly, remembering a trick he’d learned in rehab, _winks_. “Afternoon!”

He disappears around the door, leaving John Watson standing alone in the lab, blinking after him.

*

Sherlock passes Stamford at the end of the hallway, practically at a run, but manages to ignore his call—“Sherlock? Sherlock Holmes!”—and escapes through the next door he comes across, which turns out to be the door to a single-stall staff bathroom. Perhaps not the most elegant of getaways, but he supposes it would at least put a stop to any curiosity on Stamford’s part about where he was rushing off to, and the door comes handily equipped with a lock.

He leans back against the tiled wall for a few minutes, waiting for the hall to clear. He feels surprisingly solid, standing there, as if meeting John Watson has somehow shored up his foundations, has somehow settled him into his own bones.

Two minutes with a stranger in a hospital laboratory, and Sherlock feels different, in some way. In some way . . . _new_.

Though Sherlock has to admit: two minutes with John Watson didn’t feel like two minutes with a stranger. It felt like two minutes with his eyes wide open, as if everything he’s seen in all his life, all the death and all the people and all the mystery and all the answers, were _nothing_ compared to what he could see in John Watson. Like all his life, Sherlock has only been holding out a candle into the shadows of things no one was supposed to see, but John Watson could turn on the light.

But the one thing Sherlock _couldn’t_ see, the one thing that wasn’t illuminated in the glow of John Watson, was the one thing that mattered the most: is John dead, or is he alive?

Sherlock tips his head back against the loo wall and replays their conversation, the way John held his cane, the steadiness of his hands. There’s clearly some kind of suicide risk—not sleeping well, depressed, separated irreparably from his family, his career, and what was probably likely to be an extraordinary future as a surgeon—but is Sherlock meant to be _preventing_ his suicide, or helping him move on from having _already done it?_

He doesn’t know. 

It would be nice, he imagines, to just have a normal interaction with someone like John Watson for once, without having to worry about death or life or whatever comes next. To just be around someone without their death being the focus. Without their death getting in the way.

In the way of what, though: Sherlock doesn’t know that either.

He should probably go home. Tidy up. Do something about the three dead people in his sitting room. He wonders obliquely whether hanging a tie on a doorknob is as good a code for the dead as it seems to be for the living and snorts with incredulous, embarrassed laughter.

The hallway beyond the door is quiet—has been. Sherlock washes his hands in the little loo sink, more out of habit than any real need, then takes a deep breath, and, thinking about places he’d rather be, or perhaps who he’d rather be there with, reluctantly goes back to Baker Street.


	2. Chapter 2

The tidying does not get done.

Sherlock means to do it, he really does. He means to get everything all unpacked and organised and sorted, for everything to look neat and professional and like a flat should when it belongs to the sort of person who’s actually interested in hiring an assistant. He wants the flat to be inviting and maybe even a little interesting, if it could be, and perhaps the tiniest bit impressive.

He wants the flat to be the sort of place an interesting, tiniest bit impressive person like John Watson could perhaps be interested in spending even the tiniest bit of time.

But the best laid plans of men and ghosts often go awry, and it’s not so easy to unpack a flat when there are three dead people living in it.

When Sherlock hangs up his clothes, Jeffery Patterson is there, hanging over his shoulder and shaking his head in disapproval. When he makes the bed, he has to first kick James Phillimore off it. There are arguments, silent on one side but no less opinionated, about which side of the sink to put the toothpaste on, despite the fact that Sherlock is the only one who uses the toothpaste, and about which way the toilet paper should go on the holder, despite the fact that Sherlock is the only one who uses toilet paper, and about Sherlock’s sock index and medicine cabinet and _for the last time, stay off my bed!_

There are no arguments with Beth Davenport.

Sherlock finds her as he’s getting ready to tackle the sitting room, still crying in weak hiccoughing sobs on the floor. It’s not unusual for someone to cry when they find out they’re dead, but it is unusual for someone to cry for so long, so finally Sherlock sits down on the floor next to her with his laptop and looks up her family on Facebook.

“They miss you,” Sherlock tells her quietly, pulling up her daughter’s page. “But they’re going to get through it.” He points out the clues, reads out the deductions he can draw from statuses and events and likes. Empirical evidence of love and comfort and faith.

Beth doesn’t stop crying, but her tears turn silent and her edges fade a little in the weak evening light. Sherlock leaves the page open so she can see it and goes to make a pot noodle for dinner, watching from the corner of his eye as she strokes across the pixels of her daughter’s smile, and decides unpacking the sitting room can wait.

He takes a shower instead, puts on a clean pair of pants. Kicks James Phillimore out of his bed one more time and falls asleep laying the wrong way around, wondering whether John Watson will like Baker Street. Trying not to wonder, just for a minute, whether John’s family also has Facebook pages that look like funerary signature books.

 _Are you dead_ , he thinks, that same unfamiliar zing of electricity surging up his spine as he begins to drift, _or are you alive?_

*

Sherlock wakes up the next morning to his mobile buzzing insistently against his cheek: Lestrade. “Mm,” he answers.

“You’re not helping your case,” Lestrade says, skipping the _good morning_ and the _how are you_ and the _so sorry for being a prat_ . “Playing the press like that and sending all those texts, making us look like idiots.” He puts on a fake posh accent and mimics, “ _Wrong! Wrong!_ You can’t just _do_ things like this, Sherlock.”

Sherlock huffs, irritated but not entirely surprised to be getting a lecture instead of information. “Well, obviously, I can,” he returns. “I just did. Perhaps you should try not being an idiot.”

“It won’t get you on our case, if that’s what you’re after.”

“Lestrade, you and I both know that getting me on this case is the only way you’re going to solve it.”

“And _you_ know that the only way I can get you on it would be to break every rule and hope no one notices, so pulling a stunt like this isn’t exactly in your favour, is it?”

Sherlock hangs up on him. It’s not as good as getting in on the investigation, but it will have to suffice.

The trouble is, though, that Lestrade is right. Sherlock may be the best and only consulting detective in London, but he’s not on the Met’s payroll. He’s unofficial, and that means secretive, and just because Lestrade is willing to bend the rules to get results doesn’t mean that the Met’s administration is quite yet willing to remove the oversized billy club from their collective arses to do the same.

Feeling inspired to show the Met what for, Sherlock gets up and digs his collection of evidence on the serial suicide case out of his moving boxes and internet bookmarks: newspaper articles and BBC videos, interviews with clueless reporters and useless statements from building managers. He spreads everything over the kitchen table, searching furiously for some clue, some hint, something that he might have missed before.

Something that might prove to Lestrade that they need him.

He digs, and he digs, and he digs, but he finds nothing. He calls reporters, he lies to janitorial staff, he scours maps, but he finds _nothing_.

By the time the Sherlock surfaces to the sound of someone pounding at the door at half-six that evening, he’s been lost in the case for hours. He looks up from an article about the sports centre where James Phillimore’s body was found, hair mussed and shirt dusty and flat still a jumble of untouched moving boxes, and blinks dazedly at the clock before the dots connect in a burst of adrenalin: _John Watson_.

Sherlock curses and practically falls out of his seat as he jumps up, waving a frantic hand at the three dead people draped over the chaos of the sitting room. “You lot, time to clear out,” he says, hurriedly fixing his hair. “I’ve got a—client, I think. A little privacy?”

He says it like it’s not really a request and doesn’t wait to see if they actually do clear out; he’s already rushing down the stairs, trying to beat Mrs Hudson to the front door just in case John really is dead and she tries to close it in his invisible face.

But when Sherlock yanks the door open, it’s not John standing on the stoop.

Instead it’s a middle-aged woman with a pink suit and pink heels and chipped pink nail polish and smudged, garishly pink lipstick, staring at him with fierce dark eyes. “What?” Sherlock asks, a bit shortly.

The woman huffs and looks around, as though to see that no one is watching, then she opens her mouth as if to say something, and instead spills vomit down her chin. A uneasy, chilly prickle clamps down firmly over the back of Sherlock’s neck.

“Oh, no,” Sherlock says, realising. “No, no no no _no_ , I already have three of you, and now is a _really_ bad time, there’s someone coming in just a few minutes, and—” He cuts himself off when he sees the look on her face, an unimpressed glare, and sighs. “Fine,” he says. “Fine, just. Come in, we’ll have to do this fast.”

She rolls her eyes disdainfully before shoving her way past him and into the house, vomiting on the handrail as she glides upstairs in some kind of apparent retribution for her less-than-warm welcome. Sherlock groans as he follows up after her: he really, really, _really_ loathes vomit.

*

John Watson, thankfully, is late.

The lady in pink is in a foul mood, which Sherlock supposes is fair, considering she’s dead. She scowls at the mess in Sherlock’s flat, scowls at the pen she finds on the table when she isn’t able to pick it up (some kind of mental block about actually _realising_ one is dead, Sherlock knows from experience, and the expectations one has of being in such a state; it might pass, but it probably won’t), and scowls at Sherlock as he scrubs off the handrail with kitchen roll and an industrial-sized bottle of Dettol.

Once satisfied with the state of the railing, Sherlock washes his hands and chivvies the pink lady onto the sofa with James Phillimore, who is pretending not to be there by only forming the barest shadow. With one eye on the clock, Sherlock gives her the usual introductory run-down about being dead: _yes, you’re dead, no, you’re not in hell, yes, I will try my best to help you move on but yes, it takes time, yes, you can stay here but no, you don’t have to. Yes, I’ve got three others already but no, you won’t be able to see them._

_Yes, I am the only one. I’m sorry._

James Phillimore and Jeffrey Patterson, who is still fully corporeal where he’s leaning against the desk, damn him, watch Sherlock deliver this speech with dispassionate interest, like they think he’s a bit of a nutter who just likes to practice repeating it. Beth Davenport, who has fallen asleep on the floor, doesn’t notice.

The pink lady only continues to scowl.

When Sherlock checks his watch again, it’s already quarter after, and he has a brief moment of panic as he changes his shirt and fixes his hair. _What if he’s not just late?_ he thinks. _What if John doesn’t come? He should, though, shouldn’t he?_ _Just to see? I even did the wink thing, people love the wink thing._

He finally perches awkwardly by the window to watch down the street, and breathes a sigh of relief at twenty past seven when John comes round the corner. He’s limping quite heavily, over-relying on the cane with the exhausted, jostled look of someone who hates the Tube and has just got off the Tube, but his face is clear and curious.

“Now seriously, all of you disappear,” Sherlock says to the four dead people in his sitting room. “Go bother Mrs Hudson if you must, just be careful she doesn’t get too cold with you lot filling up her flat. _Now_ , please.” He gives them all a hard stare, but the effect is ruined when Beth Davenport snores gently from the floor.

Sherlock shakes his head at them and gives up, going downstairs to wait for John to knock on the door in order to circumvent Mrs Hudson again. And then, once John does, he waits another nervous half-minute to answer it so that it doesn’t _look_ like he was waiting downstairs for John to knock on the door.

“Mr Holmes, hello,” John says. He smiles. Sherlock can’t help but smile back.

“Sherlock, please,” he says, shaking John’s hand. Electricity forms in his fingertips when they touch, instead of just along his spine. For a moment he just stands there and _looks_ , entranced by the feeling, by John’s smile and by John’s warm grip, before suddenly remembering that he has to invite him up. “Shall we?”

They rustle up the stairs, and John steps into 221B with eyes alight, taking in the mess with interest. He stops less than half a foot from Beth Davenport’s shins where she’s still sleeping on the rug, almost touching but never seeing her.

“If you’ll, erm, excuse the mess,” Sherlock says, hands fluttering. He picks a few folders up off one of the armchairs and throws them into a box in a half-hearted effort to make the place look nicer; it has no effect at all. “I’ve only just moved in, haven’t managed to tidy up—Mrs Hudson, the landlady, she’s giving me a good deal on the place, owed me a favour after her husband was sentenced to death in Florida. I was able to help out.”

On the sofa, the lady in pink stares at him in unchecked, disbelieving annoyance, as though she can’t believe he’s having a _guest_ over while she’s sitting here _dead_. Sherlock carefully maneuvers so he’s standing between her and John, not wanting to notice whether she can actually see him or not. Patterson and Phillimore are, blessedly, gone.

“Sorry, you stopped her husband getting executed?”

“Oh, no.” Sherlock grins again. “I ensured it.”

John stares at him for a moment, and then, catching his meaning, tentatively grins back. He looks different when he smiles, Sherlock thinks. The hollows of his eyes seem less severe, maybe, the lines of his face less strained as new ones crop up to accommodate his laugh. _Are you alive?_ Sherlock thinks desperately. _You seem so alive, but there’s—something. Something different._

“Does that come up often, then, being a consulting detective? Ensuring people get sentenced to death?”

Sherlock shakes his head. “No, special circumstance. Mostly I’m on the other side of it—why someone died, whose fault was it, if anyone’s, that sort of thing.”

“And you need an assistant, for that sort of thing?”

There’s an edge of hesitation in John’s voice, and Sherlock steps forward, as if expecting that he could just reach out and wipe it away. “Could be,” he says. “Are you interested in assisting?”

John glances back at him, studying him. “Could be.”

Behind Sherlock, the lady in pink groans, long and put-upon, reminding him forcefully that they’re not alone. He feels the flush creep high into his cheekbones, unsure if she’s tired of watching his one-sided conversation or if she’s tired of watching them muddle through together. He doesn’t want to find out which is which.

“Look at this, then,” Sherlock says, bounding past John into the kitchen and leaving her behind. “I’ve just had a breakthrough on this case, so you’re right on time.”

John follows and peers down at the papers spread out on the table. “You’re working on the serial suicides case?”

“A bit,” Sherlock says. He walks around the kitchen to stand between John and the doorway, trying to make it seem casual, and when John’s good and distracted by one of the newspaper articles, he takes the opportunity to look back at the pink lady and make a _zip your lips_ gesture. “Have you been following it?”

“A little.” John shifts through a few newspaper articles, reading some of Sherlock’s handwritten notes in the margins intently. “I looked you up on the internet last night,” he says after a moment or two. “Found your website.”

A pleased little thrill swoops through Sherlock’s belly. “What did you think?”

John gives him a _look_ , one that is more skeptical than impressed, and the swoop in Sherlock’s stomach goes into free-fall. “You said you could identify a software designer by his tie and an airline pilot by his left thumb.”

“That’s right. And I can read your military career in your face and your leg and your brother’s drinking habits in your mobile phone. And,” he adds, just to show off, “I can read that there will have been a fourth suicide today in these papers.”

John looks back down. “How?”

Obviously Sherlock doesn’t intend to say, _because the dead woman in question is sitting on my sofa throwing me dirty looks_ , so instead he reaches past John to pick up an article at random. “They’re linked, the suicides,” he explains, trying to find a way to say what he’s realised over the last several months without saying, _well, they all shake their heads when I ask if they meant to die._ He hands the article to John, even though there’s absolutely no relevant information in it whatsoever, and picks up another.

“Whatever information the Met’s withholding from the public, it means that there’s something about these suicides that is unusual, right? Suicide by poison’s unusual enough as it is, and the Met’s admitted that it’s the same poison in each case, which is significant only if it’s an unusual formula, so probably a single source: now things are _very_ unusual. So the question is, obviously, who’s providing the poison? Why are they all taking _this specific_ poison?”

“So if the Met knows they’re all taking a specific poison from a singular source . . . ”

“The singular source knows they’re running out of time.”

“So you think they’re selling off their product as quickly as possible?”

“Could be,” Sherlock agrees, moving over to show John another totally irrelevant paper, “but more likely that the source is finding them, not the other way around. They take the poison themselves, but they’re not buyers. They’re not actually suicides at all—they’re victims. _Murder_ victims.”

“That’s amazing,” John says, and he looks up just as Sherlock looks down, and they’re somehow only inches apart. He says it again, his eyes fixed unblinkingly on Sherlock’s. “That’s . . . amazing.”

“That’s not what people normally say.” Sherlock’s voice is low, lower than he expected even. He swallows, and John’s eyes dip, watching Sherlock’s throat move. Sherlock struggles to swallow again.

“What do people normally say?” John asks, his gaze almost heavy as it slides over Sherlock’s neck, over his mouth, back up to meet his eyes. John’s eyes are blue: very, very blue. Flecks of gold. Constellations, Sherlock thinks, or bioluminescence. Veins of precious metal in the dark of the earth. The tingling sensation in his spine has spread to the insides of his elbows, to the pit of his stomach.

Sherlock can’t even remember the question. “I’ve no idea,” he manages finally, and he looks, and he looks, and doesn’t breathe.

*

There’s a sudden sound of footsteps thundering up the stairs, shattering the tension, and Sherlock twists away, gulping air like water and shaking out his hands. _You cannot do this_ _,_ he scolds himself, striding unevenly back into the sitting room.  _You don’t even know if he’s alive, Sherlock Holmes. What if he really does turn out to be dead?_

_Please, don’t let him be dead._

Lestrade appears in the doorway, out of breath and head dipped already in contrition: he’s here to invite Sherlock onto the case properly then, and Sherlock tries to tamp down on the rush of disappointment. He won’t get another moment alone with John Watson, he doesn’t think. He’s run out of time.

But it’s still a case, and an important one, and Sherlock shakes his head to bring it back into focus. There must have been something different about the death of the lady in pink, aside from the fact that she’d shown up to Baker Street before it had been announced. Something that tipped the investigation into full steam.

He clears his throat, attempts to straighten himself up a little. Ignores John looking on keenly from the kitchen. “Where?”

“Brixton,” Lestrade nods, confirming Sherlock’s deduction without a word. “Lauriston Gardens.”

The pink lady jumps up from the sofa, her scowl giving way to near excitement as she motions to Sherlock: _me, it’s me._

“What’s different this time?” Sherlock asks, trying not to look at her. He catches sight of John instead, of John’s hand on his cane and the caution in his shoulders, and has to force himself to focus on Lestrade again. “You wouldn’t have come for me if something weren’t different.”

“This one’s left a note. Well, sort of. Will you come?”

For a split second, Sherlock is tempted to make Lestrade beg for the help, to grovel a little for all the side-stepping he’s done on this case and for the argument this morning, but he’s too eager for the chance to finally get the answers to even pretend. “Not in a police car, I’ll follow in a cab.”

“Good,” Lestrade says, with a relieved sigh. “Good. I’ll text you the address, then.” He nods, shuffles his feet as if still wondering if he ought to apologise, but then apparently decides against it and disappears back down the stairs.

Before the front door even opens and closes again, Sherlock is busy calculating the angles, the sightlines, the periphery vision possibilities. If Lestrade was standing here, and Sherlock had his attention in the sitting room, and he turned just so as he left—did he just not see John, tucked back into the kitchen behind him, or was John not there to be seen?

Something heavy and cold settles in Sherlock’s gut. He won’t be able to delay this much longer now, not at a crime scene full of cops and forensics and witnesses and god knows who else. Lestrade certainly won’t allow Sherlock on the scene without asking who John is, if he can see him, and if he can’t—well.

Sherlock doesn’t usually mourn the dead he sees. He doesn’t usually think very much about the lives they leave behind. His purview is the fact of leaving, and the moving on afterwards, not the having left.

Sherlock’s never been someone they’ve left behind.

In the kitchen, John stands at the ready, a soldier waiting for his marching orders. If he was perturbed by Sherlock’s near-running away, he doesn’t show it. “This is the case, isn’t it? That’s this, um,” he rummages through the papers, pulls up one with Lestrade’s picture on it. “Detective Inspector Lestrade, right?”

“The fourth victim,” he confirms. “Just like I said there’d be.”

John smiles, with a startling edge of softness. “Brilliant.”

Sherlock feels the blush starting again high on his cheekbones and turns away to reach for his coat and scarf. “If you’re up for a bit of assisting,” he says in invitation, “the game, it seems, is on.”

John laughs and follows Sherlock out; Sherlock lets him head down the stairs first under the guise of locking up, and then turns back to the sitting room. “You don’t have to come, you know,” he tells the pink lady. “Crime scenes of oneself can be, well. They’re not for everyone.”

The pink lady _hmmphs,_ a high noise of offense, and stomps squarely on Sherlock’s toes as she bulldozes past him, letting him know exactly what she thinks of that.


	3. Chapter 3

There are awkward cab rides, and then there’s the ride to Lauriston Gardens.

By the time Sherlock and the pink lady finally make it down to the pavement, John’s standing on the kerb and apparently failing to flag down a taxi. He looks back at Sherlock as he comes out of the house and grins, eager, if a little sheepish, and Sherlock can’t help but grin back.

This could be good, Sherlock thinks. To have someone like John by his side. To have someone like John on the cases. To have a second set of eyes to look at a scene, or a body, or a suspect, and to see if someone like John could see what Sherlock saw.

If only everybody else could also see  _John—_ but to find out whether they can, Sherlock has to risk the possibility that they can’t. And if they can’t, then this wouldn't be good. It wouldn't be good at all. 

 _So this is what they mean, isn’t it? When they say that ignorance is bliss_. 

John turns back to the road and Sherlock pounces on the opportunity to, for the first time in his entire life, remain ignorant. He grabs hold of the pink lady’s arm, stopping her from approaching the kerb herself, and whispers hurriedly in her ear: “ _Don’t_ say if you can see him, I don’t want to know.” His eyes cut over to John, or at least, to the space that contains John; the pink lady’s eyebrows raise in unsympathetic surprise. “You’ll have to sit in the middle, all right? I’ll try to give you as much room as possible.”

Her face contorts with disbelief and annoyance, but he adds, much more quietly, “Please,” and she must see something in his face that she takes pity on, because she sighs and throws her hands up and, almost imperceptibly, softens.

It takes only a moment or two for Sherlock to hail a cab, and as John climbs in, he reasons to himself that plenty of people are just somehow _bad_ at hailing cabs. John’s short, after all; maybe short people always struggle to hail cabs. It doesn’t _have_ to mean anything, Sherlock insists to himself, and he makes a show of looking down the street, pretending to be distracted by something in order to cover his pause as he waits for the pink lady to slide into the middle seat before following after her.  

The three of them sit: John, oblivious with knees spread wide and arms lax at his sides, fiddling absently with his cane, and Sherlock and the pink lady squished together to the other side. It’s tense and cold where the lady’s pressed up hard against Sherlock—any closer and she’d be practically in his lap—but he’s grateful anyway.

Uncomfortable, but grateful.

“Is that what you did to me yesterday?” John asks, and since Sherlock is still thinking about how the pink lady is halfway in his lap, he nearly swallows his own tongue as the thought gets the better of his memory. “What you did with the papers, you know? Seeing things that aren’t really there?”

 _I see all kinds of things that aren’t there,_ Sherlock thinks, on the edge of a hysterical laugh.  _I’m not even sure that_ you’re _really there._ “Something like that, yes.”

“You asked if I’d served in Afghanistan or Iraq.” He looks over at Sherlock, through the pink lady; Sherlock can’t look back _through_ her, so he tries not to look back at all. “How did you know? Or, I guess, what did you see?”

Sherlock blushes and preens. There had been such a lot to see about John Watson, and nearly all of it was interesting, and Sherlock was dying to know whether he'd been right about everything. “Your tan,” he starts eagerly, but then the cab makes a turn and the pink lady grabs Sherlock’s wrist to steady herself, and suddenly he’s not quite so keen to show his hand with her shoved in between them.  _Next time, I’m in the middle_ , he thinks, and then, flustered, he says very quickly, “And your haircut. Uh, lots of ways. This and that. I’ll go through them all someday when we’re not on a case.”

He tries to say it brightly, like a promise of something to look forward to, but John’s reflection on the window looks uncomfortable, maybe a little embarrassed for having asked, and Sherlock wishes that putting one’s foot in one’s mouth would do something half so helpful as stoppering it up _before_ one could mess up a simple conversation. Instead it seems to have the opposite effect, and for once in his sorry life, Sherlock can’t think of anything else to talk about. 

The rest of the cab ride passes in stiff, squashed, awkward silence, and by the time the cab stops to let them out at the crime scene, the icy shiver on the back of Sherlock’s neck that he’s used to feeling around ghosts has become so intense that his teeth are nearly chattering. The pink lady is freezing where she’s pressed against him, and the darkness of the city has settled into the hollows of John’s eyes, into the lines of his face, almost like it’s pulling whatever remaining life he might have had out of him as Sherlock watches. He can’t get out of the cab fast enough.

But as Sherlock stands on the pavement, determinedly not looking as John and the pink lady try to exit the cab at the same time, he sees all the officers, all the technicians, all the _people_ , all the living, breathing people who might not see John if he’s not as living and breathing as they are, and Sherlock hates them, a little bit.

He wishes he’d have gone through the deductions after all. He bets he could’ve made John laugh.

“Ready?” John asks, taking a place by Sherlock’s side.

 _Not at all,_ Sherlock thinks, and makes his way forward.

*

Patrolling the yellow police tape, not unlike a particularly sharp-nosed librarian, or perhaps a bridge troll, is Sergeant Sally Donovan, who stops Sherlock with arms crossed and a disagreeable moue on her face. “Hello, freak,” she says coolly.

“Hello, Sally,” Sherlock answers, with his winningest grin. It’s a waste on Sally as much the insult was a waste on him, but it’s all a set part of the sparring at this point, a part of the game: Sherlock versus the rest of the world. Sally Donovan is just one player on a much larger board. “I’m here to see Lestrade.”

Donovan cocks her head in mock concern. “Why?” she asks, pretending at politeness.

“I was invited.” Ten points for the pretend concern, Sherlock adds to his mental tally, but minus five for the obvious struggle to not shout at him. She’s getting better, though.

“ _Why_?” Not so polite on the repeat—her teeth must be clenching hard behind that thin, insincere smile. Sherlock subtracts another five from his scoreboard; behind him, Sherlock hears John shift, re-centring his weight a little more firmly, which is equally as thrilling.

“I think he wants me to take a look,” Sherlock says, not faltering in his own cheerfulness for a second.

The encounter has now outlived Donovan’s smile. “You know what _I_ think,don’t you?” she says, but just as Sherlock begins to respond, to step forward and reach for the police tape to let himself and his unlikely troupe through, a pebble comes sailing over his shoulder and hits Donovan squarely in the chest with a dull _thwack_. “Hey! What was that?”

Sherlock turns to look; the pink lady is holding up another piece of gravel to her eye, taking aim again. “No idea,” he says, turning back just as it hits Donovan in the shoulder.

“What are you— _how_ are you—?”

“You can see both my hands, you know I’m not,” Sherlock defends, showing her his palms. “It’s coming from over there.”  He waves a hand in the general direction of a random alley, away from where John’s standing and snorting a laugh under his breath. He may not be able to see the pink lady, but he can certainly see Sherlock taking advantage of a distraction, and Sherlock puffs briefly with pride. Of course John can see it. John’s not a  _complete_ idiot. 

Donovan gives him a _look_ , a suspicious, _what-have-you-done-now_ look. “Stay here,” she says, slipping out under the police line. “And _don’t_ move. I’ll bring you through once I know for sure this isn’t a trick.” Sherlock watches after her for a moment or two, until the pink lady steps in front of him and puts her hands on her hips. _Well?_ the look says. _I got rid of her, so let’s go._

“Quickly now,” Sherlock agrees, keeping one eye on Donovan as she wanders away. He lifts the police tape for John and the pink lady to duck under. “I rather think we can find our way through without Sergeant Donovan’s help, don’t you think?”

They make their way toward the house that seems to be the centre of activity, and as they reach the pavement, another group of officers comes spilling out. The last of them all is a tall, thin man with a rabbity sort of face and his hands set combatively on his hips, who glares at Sherlock with as much distaste as Donovan had.

“It’s a crime scene,” Anderson sneers at Sherlock. “I don’t want it contaminated. Is that clear?”

Sherlock puts his grin back on, maneuvering himself so that he’s standing mostly in front of John and hopefully hiding him from view. The adrenalin of the risk—will Anderson notice, or won’t he? did Donovan, and she just didn’t say anything, or didn’t she?—is making Sherlock’s stomach roil. Every second he’s talking to someone is another second someone might expose John as alive—but it’s also another second that someone might unintentionally confirm that he’s dead.

And maybe it’s silly and maybe it’s childish and maybe it’s selfish, but Sherlock just doesn’t. Want. To know. Not yet. _Not yet._

“Quite clear,” he says brightly, instead of arguing. “Did you know, though—Donovan just went to check out a disturbance over in the alley there. She could probably use some help, if she finds anything.”

Anderson frowns, but the distraction works: he scans the cordoned-off area for Donovan, and then catches sight of her flashlight beam bouncing off the walls of the alley across the street. “On her own?” Anderson asks, but he’s already making his way forward. “If you had something to do with it—”

“It’s just that someone was throwing gravel at her, I think?” Sherlock says quickly, moving to the side so that Anderson can pass. He puts one hand out, keeping John behind him. “I didn’t quite catch it.”

Anderson doesn’t even spare him a backward glance, and Sherlock breathes a sigh of relief. There was no reason for Anderson to have noticed John, even if he were there. Really, he justifies, there was no reason for anyone to have noticed John, if they all just assumed he was with Sherlock. Sherlock’s a common enough sight, and most of the Met let him alone when he’s on the scene.

“ _Did_ you have something to do with the gravel?” John asks, watching Anderson go.

Sherlock throws an enigmatic smile over his shoulder. “I wouldn’t say it was my idea,” he answers breezily, “but it _was_ handy, wasn’t it?”

John grins back, then gives a much more serious nod over to where Anderson is ducking under the police line, following after Donovan. “They’re a piece of work.”

“I make them uncomfortable.” Sherlock shrugs. “They’re not the first.”

John frowns. “You don’t make _me_ uncomfortable,” he says, his voice hard, as if daring someone to disagree with him.

Sherlock looks down at him. “Good,” he answers slowly. “That’s . . . good.” John’s eyes are dark in the poor light on the street, but his gaze is steady, earnest. “Right. Good.”

The pink lady runs out of patience. She huffs through her nose, shoves past Sherlock, and leads the way into the house, leaving Sherlock to follow after her, and John to follow after Sherlock.

*

They find the actual crime scene up on the third floor.

The pink lady flies up the stairs, apparently eager to be reunited with the body she’d left behind. Sherlock takes the steps slowly as he puts on a pair of latex gloves, dreading what might happen when he gets to the top, his heart thumping and squeezing, pounding and clenching the whole way. Just behind him, John’s cane taps each step lightly: just enough to hit it before moving on again, not bearing any of his weight at all. The sound of it going unused makes Sherlock’s mouth curl into a tiny, embarrassed sort of smile.

“I can give you two minutes,” Lestrade says by way of greeting as Sherlock finally steps onto the third floor landing, gesturing into one of the rooms behind him. Inside, Sherlock can see glimpses of two identical pink suits—one on the floor, the other upright. “Her name’s Jennifer Wilson, according to her credit cards. Been here only about an hour before she was found.” And then he adds, like he’s about to ask a question, “Sherlock—”

“Don’t ask questions,” Sherlock says quickly, striding purposefully past Lestrade to peer over the body. The pink lady—no, Jennifer Wilson—is shaking in the corner, her face splotchy, but she isn’t crying. He does not look to see if John is hovering in the doorway, if Lestrade is looking at him. He doesn’t want to see if Lestrade’s about to introduce himself, or to ask who the hell John is, or if he’ll ignore John altogether. “They’re always terrible. Shut up.”

Lestrade tries again. “Wait, no, Sherlock—”

“Lestrade, if you want me to look at this scene, and you do, because you need me, you will _stop talking and let me think_.” And, trying to say something that would explain John’s presence if Lestrade could see him, but wouldn’t stand out as too abnormal if he couldn’t, and wouldn’t sound too bizarre to John either, he adds, as imperiously as he can muster, “Keep everyone else out for a couple of minutes while we look at this.”

It’s a juggling act, but for now, it seems to work. Lestrade sighs and leaves to tell the remaining techs on the third floor to clear off for a few minutes. Sherlock doesn’t watch him go.

 _You’re being ridiculous_ , he tells himself, crouching down to look at the body. _If he’s dead, he’s not going to be_ less _dead if you find out later. If he’s alive, you’re just subjecting yourself to an outrageously unnecessary amount of distraction and disturbance._

He shakes his head, berating himself one last time, and tries to focus on what he’s actually meant to be doing here.

Jennifer Wilson’s body is stretched out on her stomach, her face mostly hidden by her hair. The way she’s lying—not curled around herself but laid out flat—is obviously in pursuit of the letters that have been scratched into the floorboards by the fingernails on her right hand: _R A C H E._

Jennifer Wilson taps him on the shoulder, moving into his field of vision so he doesn’t have to turn suspiciously to see her. Her eyes are wet and shiny, but she forms her thumb and forefinger into a right angle and presses it at him: the letter _L._ She points at the letters on the floor and then makes the letter again.

“Rachel?” Sherlock asks. She nods. “Who’s Rachel?”

“She was writing Rachel?” John takes a few small steps forward, eager to join in. “How can you tell?”

“ _Rache_ isn’t a word in English,” Sherlock points out. “It is in German, means _revenge_ , but the balance of probability is that she’s British, so you have to consider what would have been so important that she’d scratch it into the floorboards using only her fingernails.” He looks up and tilts his head invitingly. “Come on, then, you’re a medical man. What do you think?”

John hesitates, but only for a moment. He comes over and gets on the floor across from Sherlock, studying the body but detachedly, not yet starting a proper examination. “What am I doing here?”

Sherlock quirks an eyebrow. “Helping me solve this murder, obviously.”

“They’ve got scores of forensic techs, of—pathologists, and everything. You don’t need me here, do you?”

Sherlock shrugs and looks back down at the body. The back of her coat is wet, he notices absently. “They won’t work with me.” Too personal, Sherlock thinks, watching John’s expression harden again, and as entertaining it would be if John tried show some disrespectful tech what-for on Sherlock’s behalf, it would be rather a giveaway of everything Sherlock’s trying to avoid. “Besides, this is more fun than anything you’ve got going on in your bedsit, isn’t it?”

“Fun? There’s a woman lying dead.”

The same woman’s also breathing down Sherlock’s neck. “Perfectly sound analysis,” he says, trying not to laugh, “but I was hoping you’d go deeper.”  

John huffs, makes a face like, _well, when you put it like that,_ and Jennifer Wilson watches them from the corner, breathing heavily through her nose. Sherlock nods at her, trying to look reassuring, and gestures at her body on the floor, asking permission before he touches it. She grimaces a little, but eventually nods.

“Um. Yeah, okay. Er—asphyxiation, it looks like.” John examines the colour of the skin on her face—there’s a smattering of petechiae across her eyes, her cheeks. “Passed out, choked on her own vomit.” He leans in to smell her mouth. “No smell of alcohol, though, so it could have been a seizure. Could have been drugs.”

“It isn’t,” Sherlock says. “You know what it is.”

The underside of Jennifer Wilson’s collar is as wet as the rest of her coat, he discovers, but the umbrella in her pocket—also pink—is dry. Her jewelry is generally well-cared for, except for the a wedding ring on her left ring finger—style popular in the eighties and nineties, bit cheap, bit dirty around the diamonds. He leaves them be and instead takes out his phone, doing a few quick searches. _Rain, and high winds. But no rain today in London. Where did it rain?_

There’s something else, Sherlock knows. Something else he should be seeing, but he isn’t seeing it. Instead he’s seeing John, John’s hands and eyes and curious grin. He’s seeing Lestrade, hearing the question in his voice and the ricochet of Sherlock’s own heartbeat as he tries to drown out whatever that question might be trying to ask. He’s seeing too much of everything else, too much of John Watson, and not enough of what’s laid out before him. _Focus_ , he tells himself. _Focus._

John sits back on his heels. “The serial suicides? You think she’s one of them?”

“I know she is,” Sherlock corrects. He takes a deep breath and tries to explain what he can see, hoping that will trigger whatever it is that he can’t to pop into view. “Just like I know she’s a professional person, judging by the cut of her clothes, and probably in the media industry going by the, well, shocking shade of pink. Just like I know she’s been married for ten years at least, though not happily, and that she’s travelled to London today from Cardiff.”

“From Cardiff?”

“Her coat’s still wet, and the underside of her collar, too. She’s had it turned up against the wind, but the umbrella in her pocket is dry, so strong wind. No rain anywhere in London today, but she can’t have travelled more than two or three hours because her coat still hasn’t dried.” He takes out his mobile again, brings his weather app back up. “Where, in that travel radius, has there been heavy rain and winds? Cardiff.”

John’s face lights up, like a little boy who’s just seen a magic trick. “Brilliant,” he says, and Sherlock tries not to blush.  

Standing by the body’s feet, Jennifer Wilson waves with both hands, eyes chastising. _Pay attention to me, for god’s sake._ She mimes with her right hand as though she’s dragging something behind her.

Sherlock looks back down at the body. There are tiny little splash marks on the back of her heel, even on the back of her calf, narrow-ish spread. Everything she’s wearing is pink and stylish, so not a rolling briefcase, she wouldn’t be caught dead. Well—but no. Not a briefcase: a rolling _suitcase_.

“Suitcase,” he breathes. “Where’s her suitcase?”

“Her suitcase?” Lestrade repeats from the doorway, stepping back into the room. Then he says, hesitant again, “Look, Sherlock, what—”

“Yes, her suitcase.” He pops to his feet and looks around, making a big production of it so Lestrade will focus on him. On only him, and no one else, and certainly not on the issue of whether or not there _is_ anybody else. “She’s obviously travelled from Cardiff today intending to stay one night judging by the size of the suitcase—there’s a spray of mud up the back of her right leg, distinctive, only get that from pulling something on wheels, and it’s a small one going by the spread. She’ll have had a planner in it, or some kind of organiser. Something with the name Rachel in it.” Across the room, Jennifer Wilson is miming again: talking into a phone. “A mobile,” he realises. “No mobile phone on the body, so it had to have been in her case.”

John says, “That’s fantastic,” and Sherlock does blush this time. He nearly turns and asks, _did you know you do that out loud?_ but so far neither the dead nor the living have given John away as one of their own, and although Sherlock knows he’s just barely clinging to the edge of plausible deniability, he won’t ruin it now by saying something to someone who isn’t really there.

“We didn’t find any case,” Lestrade interrupts. Did he know he was interrupting? His voice is terribly neutral. “There wasn’t any suitcase.”

Sherlock stares at him, one second, then two, and then the pieces all fall into place with a crash. There _was_ a suitcase, but if it wasn’t here, then it had to be—his heart rate jumps; his adrenalin begins to surge. He rushes out to the stairwell and calls down to anyone who might be able to hear him, “Did anyone find a suitcase? Was there a suitcase in this house?”

“Sherlock, there was no case!” Lestrade follows him out onto the landing, as does Jennifer Wilson, who is starting to gesture wildly: driving, and opening a door, and then her thumb and her forefinger forming the childish symbol for a handgun. She points it at Sherlock, brandishing it.

“Oh, of _course_!” Sherlock says, and he heads for the stairs, taking them two at a time as he racks his brain, trying to remember the pavements, the streets, the alleys of Lauriston Gardens. The _alleys._ Like the alley he sent Sergeant Donovan down on a fool’s errand. Jennifer Wilson is right behind him.

Lestrade and John appear on the landing overhead, looking down over the banister. “Sherlock?” Lestrade yells down. “What have you got?”

“It’s murder,” Sherlock shouts. “I  _knew it_ , it’s murder, all of them. Not serial suicides, but serial _murder.”_

“What makes you think that?” John calls down. Sherlock twists his face away, doesn’t want to know if Lestrade heard him, if Lestrade can see him standing there next to him.

“Her case, of course! She had a suitcase, but it isn’t here. Did she _eat_ it? No! Someone else _must_ have been here, and they took her case!” Upstairs, Jennifer Wilson had mimed driving. _Driving._ “Someone must have driven her here, forgot the case was in the car.”

Next to him, Jennifer Wilson is nodding encouragingly, clapping her hands together. “He’ll have had to get rid of it as soon as he realised he had it,” he tells her, and as John Watson is still upstairs, he doesn’t care in the least if it looks like he’s talking to himself. “Which means it’s here, it’s close, we just have to find it.” Then he looks back up to Lestrade and calls, “Get on to Cardiff, find out who Jennifer Wilson’s family and friends were. Find Rachel!”

“Rachel?” Lestrade calls back.

“The _word,_ obviously! Only word it could have been, isn’t it?” And then Jennifer Wilson is tugging on his arm, tugging him through the door and back out into the night, tugging him along to find the next piece of the puzzle, to the piece she could not have made him understand without making him first understand _why_ she died the way she died.

He looks up once more, searching out John’s face and hoping he’ll hear Sherlock’s plea, silent as it is— _come on, come on!_ —but as Jennifer Wilson drags him out of the house, John isn’t behind them.

“Wait,” Sherlock hisses, tugging on Jennifer Wilson’s arm as soon as they’re out of earshot from anybody else. “Wait, you have to wait for John—”

But Jennifer Wilson does not wait. She shakes herself free, jabs a finger at Sherlock’s face, and then taps her own chest. _Me. You’re supposed to be helping me._ Her face is wild, determination on the verge of panic. _So_ help _me._

And she turns and marches off.

Sherlock sighs, reluctant and torn, but ultimately she’s _right._ John will be able to find his way out of the crime scene and back home on his own, but Jennifer Wilson won’t be able to find her way out of this half-living death without Sherlock.

He chases after her.

*

One has to admire her, actually, Sherlock thinks several minutes later, having followed Jennifer Wilson down the pavement and eventually across the street and into the wide mouth of an alley. She must have no more than closed her eyes to die before she was on her feet again, chasing after her killer. He imagines she must have been quite something, in life. Determined and strong-willed. Maybe even a little intimidating. If her killer could see her now, he thinks, he would have thought twice about choosing her as a victim.

He wonders idly about what John was like when he was alive, and immediately berates himself for the thought. _Don’t you dare think that yet_ , he tells himself. _You’re theorising without all the facts._

Is he, though? He could have written off Sally Donovan and Philip Anderson. He could even have written off the dozen members of the Met that they’d all walked past. But could he—could he _really_ , honestly—write off Lestrade? They’d all been in the same room together, and Lestrade hadn’t said anything about John. He could have interrupted Sherlock to say something, instead of letting Sherlock interrupt him. He could have introduced himself to John, or asked John to introduce himself at least.

But he didn’t.

Still: Lestrade is very well-known for letting Sherlock have his run of the place, and Sherlock _had_ been very insistent. Perhaps he’d get a text in an hour or two, asking who it was that Sherlock had had in tow, and everything would be fine.

 _Yes,_ Sherlock consoles himself, checking his mobile. No new messages. _Everything would be fine._

He wishes John were still with him, though. It’s much easier to think of him as alive when Sherlock can see him: the light in his eyes, the smile on his mouth. From far away like this, Sherlock can’t tell if the memory is too full of wishful thinking, or if it’s just his belief in his own observations that starts to fade.

After about ten minutes of tracing their way through the back alleys of London, Jennifer Wilson finally stops next to a skip and stands, hands on her hips and an implacable look on her face. It’s a look that says, very clearly, _get in._

Sherlock doesn’t even bother arguing with her. “This is where he dumped it?”

She nods.

“And how will I know it’s yours?”

She twirls her hands into a classic Vanna White pose: _look at me._ When Sherlock only raises an eyebrow, she tugs at her skirt, and her coat, and then taps one pink heel along the concrete. He remembers the pink umbrella, and then: “Oh! Right, of course.”

Skips are not, unfortunately, Sherlock’s favourite part of being a consulting detective, and he thinks on the next go-round he’s going to choose a career that spends significantly less time rooting around in them. There’s really no graceful way to get up into it, which Jennifer Wilson notices with an extremely smug look on her face, and although most of the refuse is bagged away, Sherlock does step in something that squishes in an extremely unpleasant way.

Luckily, it takes him less than five minutes to find what he’s looking for, and Sherlock emerges, a little soggy and not just a little smelly, but triumphant, with a small wheeled suitcase in hand.

It is, somewhat predictably, vivid pink.

*

As soon as they hit the main road, Jennifer Wilson stops, looking back over her shoulder, back in the direction of Lauriston Gardens and the crime scene. “You can go back,” Sherlock tells her. “I’ve got to take this back to Baker Street and see what I can get from it, but you know where to find me when you’re ready.” _When you’re ready to leave_ _your body behind._

She looks down at the suitcase and then back up, her hands starting to gesture again, something about _no_ and again about driving, but Sherlock can’t make sense of it. Annoyed, she tries to speak around the vomit in her mouth but only manages a gargling noise before it starts dripping everywhere. Sherlock grimaces.

“Go on,” he says, waving a hand at her. “I’ll work on this and meet you back at Baker Street.”

Finally she gives up and gives in, nods, turns back and takes off like her body is a homing beacon she can’t ignore. She wraps her arms around herself as she goes, and Sherlock can’t help but feel a little sorry for her, too. He imagines that she’d expected something else out of her death, something other than having to solve her own murder. He wonders what it was.

He wonders what John Watson had thought death would be like. Wonders if it’s easier for them, if they find out weeks or months later that they’re dead, or if it’s harder.

_Baker Street. Come at once, if convenient. - SH_

Sherlock hails a cab, wrangles the pink suitcase into the back seat, hoping John made it out of the crime scene all right. Or maybe he sat and waited for Sherlock to come back. Or maybe he got to talking with a forensic tech about the state of the body, or maybe he asked someone a question and got a nasty surprise when no one would answer him.

He waits, waits, waits. John doesn’t text back.

_If inconvenient, come anyway. - SH_

John still doesn’t text back. Maybe he’s just one of those people who never texts anyone back, Sherlock rationalises to himself, the sort who reads all your texts and understands and even acts in accordance with the information contained therein, but can’t, for whatever reason, be arsed to say _okay_ or _on my way_.

_Could be dangerous. - SH_

Another thought strikes him then: maybe John Watson just isn’t interested in _Sherlock_. Maybe it’s nothing so complicated as life or death or the in-between at all. Maybe it’s just that John looked at him, in a crime scene, or with papers spread out all over his flat, or with everyone else around them dripping with disdain, and decided it wasn’t for him. Maybe it’s just Sherlock, plain and simple _,_ and now that John’s seen more of him, he’s just not that interested after all.

But no, Sherlock thinks. For once, for maybe the first time, he’s sure that’s not it, because John had said _brilliant_ , and he’d said _fantastic,_ and his jaw had hardened and his eyes had looked, and looked, and looked, and Sherlock sits in the back of the cab on the way to Baker Street and remembers how it had felt to be seen.

*

When he gets back to the flat, the rest of the ghosts have mostly cleared out, thank god. He strongly suspects that James Phillimore is downstairs watching telly with Mrs Hudson—he suspects she reminds him of his gran—and Jeffrey Patterson often spends his evenings elsewhere, presumably looking on left-behind family (or, more likely, his left-behind lover) like a lost puppy. Sherlock does find Beth Davenport asleep on the little single bed in the upstairs room, and he supposes it must make for an improvement over the floor. He leaves her be.

He sets the suitcase on the coffee table and, fingers crossed for a good clue, opens it.

There’s no phone in the suitcase. There’s another business outfit, also pink, and one she probably would have worn out running or to a gym, complete with pink and white trainers, pyjamas, toiletries. The usual travel accoutrements: boring.

He does find an organiser, though, filled to the brim with dates and events, with receipts for lattes from Starbucks and sandwiches from Pret, with business cards for this journalist or that one, all stuffed in between the pages and forgotten. _MacDonald Project Due_ is written in large uppercase letters on 10/2. The nineteenth of September is an anniversary of some kind, the box outlined in pink pen with a little number _14_ written into the bottom corner.

The detritus of a life that will go unlived.

There’s no Rachel in the organiser, though the front page does have what is presumably Jennifer Wilson’s own mobile number written on it. Perhaps he ought to wait for Jennifer to come back before he calls it, though. Perhaps they’d be able to sign through who Rachel was; if he wrote out a couple common social relationships she could just point easily enough. Mother-daughter, sister-sister, friend-friend. An affair? Could explain the unhappily married aspect.

(Does John Watson have someone who is missing him? Friends? People he likes—people he doesn’t like?) Sherlock checks his phone: no new messages. (A girlfriend?)

He needs more information, really. (A boyfriend?) Everything’s too nebulous yet, too stretched apart. Points of interest, but not yet connected into any sort of web. He’s missing something. Something he can’t yet see.

Normally he’d talk it out, pace or play or whatever, talk himself through the problem until he could find the gaps and draw the connections, but he’s as close to alone as he’s been in ages, and he _feels_ it now, feels the space all around him, empty and quiet. He’s usually alone, but for the ghosts, but he doesn’t usually feel it quite like this, and it makes him feel insecure, self-conscious about all the space in the room.

He sticks a nicotine patch to his forearm and tries to focus.

*

And then: the sound of the door closing downstairs, a triple-thud on the stairs. Sherlock’s brow furrows as the sound urges him up out of his thoughts: John is in a hurry. He sits up, terribly curious, just as John comes through the door.

John doesn’t even pause. He strides forward, his cane barely touching the ground, and grabs Sherlock by the shoulders. “Are you all right?” he demands. “Sherlock, _are you all right?_ ”

Sherlock jumps under his touch—his palms are _warm_ —and tries to fight him off, hands feeble with surprise. “I’m _fine._ What happened?”

John ignores him, rubbing his arms, running fingers over Sherlock’s wrist and neck, inspecting, frowning at the three nicotine patches on Sherlock’s forearm, until finally he seems to realise himself and, after an awkward pause, lets Sherlock’s hand drop back to his chest with a _thump_. “You’re okay.”

“Ye-es,” Sherlock says slowly. “Why are you expecting I’d not be? What happened?”

There’s a second where John just studies him, face flushed, mouth thin, eyes worried, and then he steps away. He runs his hands over his face and shakes his head, like he’s trying to clear it. “Nothing, he says, totally unconvincing. ”God. I don’t know. It must be nothing.“

“John.”

“It couldn’t have been.” He paces for a moment and then falls into an armchair. “I thought I saw something, but I—I couldn’t have. I couldn’t have.”

“Tell me. What. Happened.”

“You left me at that crime scene,” John says, flustered enough to not sound accusatory. Sherlock blushes anyway in guilt, but John doesn’t seem to notice. “So I went home.” He stops, looks sheepishly up at Sherlock. He’s _embarrassed_ , Sherlock realises, and it’s altogether endearing and baffling and a tiny bit frustrating. “But what I saw—I couldn’t have seen. But I’d never before—only since meeting you, so I thought—but it’s _not possible_.”

“You’d be surprised what’s possible,” Sherlock tells him, and as soon as the words leave his mouth, he realises. _Of all the meddling, nosy bastards—_

“I—yeah, it wasn’t, though.” John laughs at himself, high and a bit hysterical. “The—the flying, things were _moving_ , Sherlock, lights doing, you know. It’s just—it’s not possible.”

Sherlock pretends to ponder this, trying his damndest not to smile and roll his eyes. There's a little flutter in his stomach that’s preventing him from taking it as seriously as it should: a little flutter that says _John Watson wanted you to be all right._ “Did you say anything to it?”

“To _it?_ Sherlock, what—”

“ _Did you._ Say anything to it.”

John stares. “Um. No, I. I just got my—well. I just got some things together and I left. Got your texts, so I came here.”

“And then a woman in a black town car offered you a ride, did she?”

John’s look sharpens, sours. “How did you know that.” It’s a question, but he doesn’t say it like a question. He says it like an order. Army doctor, indeed. The fluttery thing in Sherlock’s belly settles itself a little lower.

“Told you your life history, did she?”

“Yeah,” he says loudly. “Yeah, she did. How did you know?”

“Brought you here without even asking,? And you felt a disembodied hand holding yours as you were getting out of the car too, I bet?”  Sherlock finds he’s enjoying this a bit, though he makes a note to never say so. It wouldn’t do to encourage this sort of thing, after all.

John shifts uncomfortably in his seat. “That. I know that isn’t possible.”

Sherlock can’t help himself now, and he does grin. “But you did feel it,” he says with eyebrows raised knowingly. John doesn't answer, still staring at him, and Sherlock rolls up off the sofa with some extreme self-satisfaction. How better to entice than to put a little mystery in it? And now that John’s here, Sherlock definitely wants to entice. Definitely wants to keep John by his side, and definitely does _not_ want John to hold being left at a crime scene against him. “I’ll take care of it, but it’s not our problem right now. Right now, I need you to send a text.” He goes hunting on the desk for the piece of paper he’d written the number down on: Jennifer Wilson’s mobile number.

John stares. “What—what? I just told you that my bedsit is being, I don’t know—haunted? And it’s stalking me with town cars and pretty women? And it’s not your problem, is that it?”

“It’s no one’s problem,” Sherlock says diplomatically. “It’s just a scare tactic. Don’t worry about it. Send this number a text, exactly as I say it. Are you ready?”

John huffs and obviously wants to protest, but after a minute he’s fumbling with his phone, pulling up the messaging screen despite himself. “Give me a minute,” he says, and Sherlock waits patiently, making his way over the window and scanning the street until he finds what— _who—_ he’s looking for.

It might’ve been advantageous, in the long run, and it might’ve even been something very close to _helpful_ , but Sherlock has standards to uphold, after all, and, making sure John can’t see him from where he’s sitting, he looks down at the street, meets a dark gaze, and gives the person standing there the finger.


	4. Chapter 4

There’s only one person in the world who knows what Sherlock can see, and even that one only knows because he had died in the Bishopsgate bombing of 1993, and then he’d gone home.

Sherlock had been seventeen. Mycroft had been twenty-four, and already assigned to an MI5 task force focused on domestic threats. Although the bomb had been reported prior to its detonation, Mycroft had been on the scene assisting law enforcement with evacuations. He had found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, and then, several minutes later, still in the _same_ place, but somehow on the other side of it.

He’d gone home, blood-soaked and dusty, with a metal plate from god-knows-what lodged halfway into his brain, and had opened the door to his childhood bedroom to find Sherlock, hanging out of the window, a little more than halfway through smoking a joint.

“‘Lo,” Sherlock had said, drowsily.

“Sherlock?” Mycroft had gasped, and then, despite himself, “Is that _marijuana?”_

Sherlock had later thought that it was a very good thing that it _had_ been marijuana, and that he’d been smoking it for quite a while when Mycroft walked in, because otherwise he would probably have fallen out of the window in surprise. As it was, though, he had only noticed Mycroft’s death as something of an afterthought, and later he’d remember thinking, quite clearly, _he_ would _stick around, just to annoy me_.

“Don’t be a prick,” Sherlock had said, rolling his eyes. “It’s boring.”

“I’m not a prick,” Mycroft had protested faintly, “I’m _dead_.”

“Don’t be stupid, I can see that, obviously.” Sherlock had taken another drag on his joint and looked Mycroft over with some sort of curious disinterest. “Is that all your blood, by the way?”

Mycroft had looked down at himself as though he were seeing the blood for the first time. “I think so.”

Sherlock had nodded. “Can I see your brain through that gap, do you think?” He’d gestured at the plate in Mycroft’s head. Mycroft had huffed in put-upon irritation.

“Do you _normally_ see dead people?” he’d asked.

Sherlock had shrugged. “De profundis clamavi ad te Domine,” he had said grandly, and he’d taken another long drag and turned back to the window, trying and failing to puff the smoke out into circles. “I see more dead than living, I think. And now I guess I’ll see you too.”

*

“I’m sorry for your loss,” everyone had said. At the funeral. At the reception, afterward. Not wanting to draw attention to MI5’s involvement in the bombing, a different cause of death had been floated for the mourners: a freak Tube accident. “What an unexpected loss.”

Sherlock hadn’t felt like he’d lost anything. In fact, he had seen more of Mycroft in the last week than he had in the last several years. It was weird and bizarre and uncomfortable, sure, but it wasn’t a _loss_.

“A freak _Tube_ accident?” Mycroft had said, horrified. “They couldn’t at least make it _dignified?”_

*

Mycroft had been dead for twelve days when he’d barged into Sherlock’s room, flustered and irate. “You could have _warned me_ that I wasn’t the only one in the house, Sherlock Holmes!”

Sherlock, half asleep on the bed, hadn’t looked up. “The only one what.”

“The only _dead person_ , obviously! I’ve just surprised Mrs Bertrand in the sitting room, and I spent the better part of half an hour trying to convince her that _this—”_ he gestured at the metal plate sticking out of his head— “was perfectly normal and nothing to worry about!”

Sherlock had frowned, and then pushed himself up onto one elbow. “You can see Mrs Bertrand? She could see you?”

“ _Yes I can see Mrs Bertrand, you unbearable snot._ Honestly, Sherlock, it has been an incredibly long few days, could you at least _try_ to make this a little easier on me?”

Sherlock had ignored him, and scrambled off the bed to run down to the sitting room. When he came back, he was white-faced and trembling. “You could see her. And she could see you.”

“Yes, of course I—” but then he noticed Sherlock’s face, and promptly shut up. “That’s unusual, is it?”

“No one sees the dead but me,” Sherlock had whispered. “They don’t see each other. But am I—Mycroft, does that mean that _I—”_

“No, don’t be ridiculous,” Mycroft had assured him, fury forgotten in the face of Sherlock’s alarm. “You interact with both the dead and the living, don’t you? And I can’t interact with the living. And you were still perfectly alive when I last spoke to Mummy, that weekend before, so . . . no. You don’t feel like one of us anyway.”

But Sherlock had been shaken, and later he would think it ironic that the most shocking moment of Mycroft’s death had been the realisation of his own mortality, and he’d felt wrong in his own skin for days afterward. He’d clung, feeling embarrassingly young, to any attention he could get from a living person for a few days; after that, he’d decided it was better to try to escape the feel of his own body altogether, and smoking marijuana out of Mycroft’s bedroom window had turned out to be the least of all the things that would do the trick.

 _He should leave_ , Sherlock had thought, _the way Carl Powers did. What’s he waiting for? He should leave._

*

“Do you ever wonder why there’s something wrong with us?” Sherlock had asked once, watching a dead woman limp down the lane, past the house. _Hit by a car on her morning walk,_ he thought. _Today? Yesterday? Last week?_ “Why we are the way that we are?”

“Suppose someone had to be,” Mycroft had answered dryly. He had been trying and failing to pluck Sherlock’s cigarette away from him. “All lives end.”

Sherlock had wondered how long it would take her to realise she was dead. Whether her family already knew. “All hearts are broken.”

Mycroft had looked at him sharply, and, forgetting himself a moment, had managed to twitch the ash off the end of Sherlock’s cigarette. “Caring is not an advantage, Sherlock.”

*

Two weeks had become two months, and then two years, and Mycroft had not left. Sherlock’s eyes had blackened, and Mycroft had worried and worried and worried. Sherlock’s skin had drawn taut over his bones, and Mycroft had shouted and learned, determined and furious, to knock the needles away. Sherlock had gotten into university and into trouble, and Mycroft had followed him even to London, haunting the corners of the libraries and the laboratories. Sherlock had stopped going to them, and found other places to spend his time, and then finally Mycroft had bargained Sherlock into someplace else: rehab.

“I’ll go somewhere else,” Mycroft had promised. “Just—please.”

So Sherlock had gone.

*

After that, they had ignored each other for a long time, and by the time Sherlock had turned twenty-three, Mycroft had found a clairvoyant who, although she couldn’t see Mycroft and couldn’t interact with him the way Sherlock was able to, could still communicate with him more often than not. With the clairvoyant’s help, Mycroft had eventually found his way back to MI5, where it turned out that being invisible and being unable to die _again_ had certain advantages.

Sherlock had hated it.

“You’re not supposed to do things like this,” he’d told Mycroft. “You’re supposed to _move on_ from this, not stay in it forever.”

“Really,” Mycroft had said dryly. “And how old is the oldest one of us you’ve ever seen?”

Sherlock had refused to answer, because it had been only three days before that he’d met a group of 3rd century Frankish mercenaries with their throats all slit. “They don’t know they’re dead. You do. So move on already. Tell me what you need to move on, and I’ll do it. Just—you can’t stay, Mycroft, that’s not how it’s supposed to work.”

“I don’t _know_ what I need,” Mycroft finally had snapped. “Don’t you think I’ve been looking? I’ve been dead six years, Sherlock. _Six years._ If I could move on, I’d have done it already. We just have to learn to accept that, at least for the foreseeable future, I’m going to be stuck here. Let’s just. Let’s just make the best of it.”

“I’ll figure it out,” Sherlock had vowed, vicious and vehement. “I’m going to figure it out.”

Mycroft had sighed and bowed his head. “De profundis clamavi ad te Domine,” he had said, a repetition from what seemed like a thousand years ago or more. “I hope that you do, Sherlock. I hope that you do.”

*

Sherlock had never figured it out.

They made the best of it.

 


	5. Chapter 5

John’s phone begins to ring.

They both stare at it, holding their breath—Sherlock, exhilarated, and John, fighting his alarm. “So that’s—that’s the murderer?”

“Has to be, doesn’t it? The options are: either the murder has gotten rid of the phone, the same way he did the suitcase, or he still has the phone. Hardly likely that someone’s phoning you back from the bottom of a skip, equally as unlikely that he’d have been more careless than he was with the suitcase so he can’t have just _lost_ it, so the odds are that it’s the murderer.”

“Maybe it’s unrelated to this case,” John suggests. “I get, you know. Phone calls. Sometimes.”

“Do you?” Sherlock asks, with a grin. “Lots of withheld calls at coincidental moments?”

John laughs. “Uh, well. No. Suppose I don’t. Which means you just gave a murderer my number. Thanks for that.”

“Fortunately, he doesn’t kill people using their mobiles. Hard to text poison, after all—I’m sure you’ll be fine.”

There’s a split second where John seems to consider the idea seriously, then they both dissolve into laughter. John’s face scrunches up in a peculiar way when he laughs, Sherlock notices, in a way that squeezes his cheeks together but still leaves his eyes huge and wondering and undeniably _interested_.

Over the sound of John’s giggle, though, there’s a distinctive thump from upstairs: Beth Davenport must have woken up. Sherlock sobers up fast—no doubt she’ll be stumbling down the stairs in just a moment or two, and he seriously doubts her ability to be half so subtle as Jennifer Wilson.

Sherlock jumps up and reaches for his coat: it’s definitely time to get John Watson out of the flat.

“Send another text,” he directs. “Now that we know he’s got the phone, we can use it to bring him to us. Send: _22 Northumberland Street. Please come.”_

John inputs the text; Sherlock can’t help but notice that he’s terribly slow about it. It should be irritating to watch him tap out each letter, but John’s look of concentration turns it into an impossibly endearing tableau instead. “Why not here?”

“Because I don’t particularly care to have a serial killer in my flat,” Sherlock says easily, which makes John laugh again. “Did you send it?”

“Sent it. What’s 22 Northumberland? Some sort of police stakeout or something?”

John looks up at him just as Sherlock goes to put on his scarf, and his eyes seem to stick at Sherlock’s neck, making Sherlock feel dizzy and bubbly and ridiculous. “Four people are dead, there’s no time for the police,” he says, mouth suddenly gone dry. “Northumberland Street’s just around the corner, though; we should make it in plenty of time before the killer gets there.”

“We? _We_ are going to go stake-out a serial killer?” His voice _says_ it’s a bad idea, but his feet adjust themselves beneath him and he leans forward in his chair, and Sherlock doesn’t miss the way his hand tightens around his cane, the way he’s holding it like he could be prepared to use it as a weapon.

“Well,” Sherlock says, unable to keep the smirk off his lips, “I suppose you could just sit here and watch telly, if you like.” He gestures toward the telly behind John’s chair, then turns on his heel and swans out, taking the stairs slowly enough that John will be able to catch up.

And sure enough, after no more than a second, he hears a very quiet “ _damn!”_ and a scramble, and then John is there, clattering down the stairs after him. Sherlock’s chest swells and his smile spreads, and he leads John out into the London night.

*

The evening, Sherlock thinks, is definitely looking up.

London is beautiful like this: the sky crisp and sharp, the lights pouring out of the shops bright and colourful. The streets are busy enough to be interesting, but not so busy as to ruin the anonymity of being in a crowd, and for once, Sherlock can walk alongside John Watson and not worry about whether anyone else can see him.

John himself is a sight to be had, too, barely a half-step behind Sherlock, his cane nearly totally superfluous as he strides evenly along. Sherlock can see something new in the hold of his shoulders, in the length of his spine—something that says _soldier_ , something that says _readiness_ , something that says _adventure._

“This,” Sherlock says grandly, holding his arms out at the feast of the city laid out before them, “is his hunting ground, John. This, right here in the heart of the city. Now that we know his victims were abducted, that changes everything, right? All his victims disappeared from busy streets, crowded places, but nobody saw them go, nobody saw a struggle. How does someone manage it?”

“Dunno,” John says. “Why do you think they were abducted if there was no struggle?”

Sherlock glances over with a little frown. “She was driven to the scene, obviously. How else does someone get driven to a place?”

John shrugs. “Same way everyone else gets driven someplace: in a cab. Isn’t the question really, who would she have gotten into a cab with? Jennifer Wilson, she was from out of town, right? So who would she trust? And how did someone get her in and out of a cab on the way to her death without the cabbie noticing anything?”

The evidence map in Sherlock’s mind’s eye suddenly reshuffles, the lines illuminating different paths, as though John had flipped a railway switch and redirected the routes just by musing aloud. Without a struggle—out of town—driven from busy places—in a cab—without anyone seeing anything—without the _cabbie_ noticing—oh, oh, _oh!_

Sherlock stops dead in the middle of the pavement and stares. “John, that’s it. That’s _it!”_

“Okay,” John says, clearly not understanding. “What’s it? Do you—do you know who he is?”

“No—no, I know _what_ he is!” He presses the heels of his palms into his temples on both sides, solidifying the evidence map in his mind, building in details, noticing missed clues. “So do you, if you think about it. Jennifer Wilson, who isn’t from London, who’s only planning to stay one night—how did she end up in a taxi with a killer and a cabbie without the cabbie _noticing_?”

“Dunno. How?”

“The killer and the cabbie are the _same person_. One and the same, John! We just need to find the right cab, and we’ll have him!” He laughs, giddy with excitement, and takes off again toward Northumberland Street. This isn’t just a lead after all—it’s the _solution_ , the big, beautiful, _brilliant_ solution, it’s the end, it’s the _answer_ to every question Sherlock has been driving himself mad over since Jeffrey Patterson first appeared in his flat all those months ago.

It is the resolution Jeffrey Patterson has been waiting for, and James Philimore, the resolution for Beth Davenport, for Jennifer Wilson, for their families, for their friends, for their Facebooks full of funerary signatures. For their ghosts.

Sherlock just has to find the right cab.

“There are—there are cabs up and down this road,” John protests, following after him. “How will you know which one it is?”

“Only one will stop at number 22, isn’t that right?” Sherlock calls back, urging John forward. The cane in John’s hand isn’t even touching the ground now, he notes absently; John must be vibrating with as much energy as Sherlock is. “We just have to wait for a cab to stop, and that’ll be our man, won’t it? Come on!”

*

They stop outside Angelo’s to wait.

Sherlock would have liked to have taken John inside—it is chilly out, after all, and Angelo is booming and affectionate and generous with wine—but given the state of things, he doesn’t think it’s a wise idea. Instead they end up on the black metal bench just outside the door, John’s cane hooked over the arm to leave his hands free, bumping shoulders precariously like two people nervously waiting for a table on a first date.

He would like to be here as one of those two people, Sherlock thinks. With John. With the wine, and the soft lights, and the lingering looks and whispered secrets. He thinks John would like to be one of those two people too.

At least, he hopes John would.

But it will have to wait until the case is solved.

Until the mystery of John Watson is solved too, he supposes, and then he thinks that there’s a chance he’ll never get to bring John here after all, and Sherlock has to clear his throat against himself and turn his attention back to Northumberland Street. A dead man with burns up the side of his arm waits patiently by a bus stop. A woman, with blood dried into sticky rivulets down her face, checks her reflection in the windows of a pharmacy, and, apparently satisfied, keeps on walking, neatly side-stepping a bloke walking his dog.

He’s never seen a dead animal, Sherlock doesn’t think. Certainly not a dead dog. Perhaps it’s really true what they say: all dogs go to heaven.

“Tell me about the ghost,” John says suddenly.

Sherlock nearly stumbles, even though he’s sitting down, and John reaches out a hand to steady him—is John going to make a _habit_ of surprising him? Sherlock isn’t sure whether to be delighted or anxious. “What?”

“My ghost?” John repeats. “The thing that happened at my flat? You weren’t even surprised by it, but things like that—things flying and everything—they don’t happen in real life.”

“Don’t they?” Sherlock says faintly, as he reaches for an explanation that isn’t there. “What does happen in real life then?”

He’s never really been directly confronted about the ghosts before—not even Lestrade has asked him about it, even though Sherlock is well aware that, when they first started working together on cases, he got a very similar visit as the one John did tonight. He’d just done what most people do: ignored it, pretended it hadn’t happened, and eventually forgot about it.

Sherlock’s never been asked outright, and he feels wildly unprepared to have to lie about it now.

“Lots of things,” John says. “But not things flying around in the air, lights turning on and off. I thought maybe it had something to do with the crime scene, actually, that was why—and your text said something was dangerous, and I was worried about you. I just want to make sure you’re all right.”

He looks earnest and understanding and patient, like he’s treading as gently as he can toward the mystery, and Sherlock realises that he doesn’t _want_ to lie to John Watson.

But is it worth the risk?

He thinks about John looking over Sherlock’s table full of notes and of John bending down next to Jennifer Wilson’s body, his concentration and his enthusiasm. He thinks about John trusting him, about John taking him seriously, about John’s lack of suspicion and look of interest when Sherlock started to explain how he’d found the pink suitcase. He thinks about John texting an unknown number, and laughing when he found out he’d texted a serial killer, and the warmth of his shoulder against Sherlock’s, the way it seems to bleed into Sherlock’s chest.

He thinks about whether John is dead or alive and how long he can really go on pretending not to notice that he’s one or the other and maybe not the one Sherlock wants him to be.

But he thinks too about the things he’s seen and the stories he’s heard and the fear he’s endured, and he thinks about how sometimes he wishes he didn’t have to do it alone. He thinks about Mycroft, the only other person who knows what it’s like, who _understands_ , standing out of reach on the other side of an impossible veil.

“You can tell me anything,” John says quietly. “If you’re in trouble, or if there’s something—it doesn’t matter. You can tell me, Sherlock.”

Sherlock watches the street for a few moments, searching for the words. How to say the impossible thing. How to confess the only confession—to tell the only secret that has ever really mattered. “I’m not in trouble. I just don’t want you to think I’m crazy,” he admits, trying for a reassuring half-smile to ease some of the tension.

“I already think you’re a bit crazy,” John says, returning his smile easily. “So why don’t you try me.”

A few taxis drive by; Sherlock fidgets with the fringe on his scarf. John waits patiently, that soft smile unwavering. “Do you ever feel that prickly sensation on the back of your neck?” Sherlock asks finally, staring down the street at 22 Northumberland, not daring to look over at John. “Do you ever have the hair on your arms stand up for no reason?”

John shifts closer, his soft smile wavering with uncertainty and concern. “Yes.”

“Do you know,” he goes on carefully, precariously, “why you’re afraid when you’re alone in the dark? I do, John.” He dares to look up; John is staring back, utterly serious. “I do.”

“I take it you’re not referring to the PTSD,” John says, but it’s not really a joke and they both know it. It’s the sort of thing people say when they need to say something because there’s too much tension in their chest and they need to let it out somehow. Sherlock doesn’t blame him, and doesn’t let himself be deterred.

“ _De profundis_ ,” he says, drawing each word out from a memory he shouldn’t have. From conversations that should never have happened, with a brother who’d already died. The gentle lull of traffic soothes the rough edges of his voice. “Do you know the psalm? _De profundis clamavi ad te Domine.”_

John shakes his head. “No, I. I stopped going to services pretty young. It’s Latin?”

Sherlock nods. “ _Out of the depths, I cry to you, O Lord_ ,” he translates. “It’s a lament for the dead. A cry for mercy; an entreaty to faith.”

“I wouldn’t have thought you’d be religious.”

“I’m not, but religion has spent a lot of time contemplating death over the years. They’ve already found most of the best words to say anything about it.”

For a moment, it’s quiet, sitting there together on the cusp. John’s close enough that Sherlock can hear him breathing, but they don’t look at each other. Sherlock’s been looking at 22 Northumberland for so long that he hardly even sees it anymore, like looking at yourself too long in the mirror so that the pieces of your face begin to disassemble in the dark.

Sherlock takes a deep breath, and then he says it: the thing he has never before dared to say. The thing that seemed like it _must_ be untrue, even as he lives it.

“I see dead people.”

A cab rolls up Northumberland Street and doesn’t stop. On the corner, a couple pauses for a kiss, and John does not laugh into the silence that’s settled on the bench, does not rear back in joking or in anger, and Sherlock thinks that the silence might be the sound it makes when you fall in love with someone.

“You mean other than at crime scenes,” John says.

It’s Sherlock who almost laughs at that. “Yes. Other than at crime scenes.”

“In your dreams?”

“No, not in my dreams.” Sherlock risks a sideways glance at John’s face, at the line of his jaw, the tilt of his chin, and looks away again. “It’s only in my dreams I don’t see them, actually.”

“I don’t understand.”

“When I’m awake. They’re just. Just walking around, like regular people. They just don’t realise that they’re dead, and so they’re going on with what they have to be going on with.”

 _Please believe me,_ Sherlock thinks, as loudly as he can. _I’m sorry it’s not the way you see them, in your dreams, your memories. Please believe me anyway. I’ve never had anyone I could tell before. I’ve never had anyone like you at all, before, you’re so much—so much_ — _just so much. Please be just a little bit more._

“How often do you see them?” John asks.

“All the time,” Sherlock answers, unexpectedly choked. John’s hand twitches next to him; Sherlock thinks about taking it. “They’re everywhere.”

John does look at him then, and Sherlock can’t help but look back. He feels—not pinned, not like a butterfly laid out to be studied, but stuck in a different way. More like a photograph, stuck to an album page so it could be remembered. So it would never be forgotten. “That’s why you’re a detective, isn’t it.”

“I—” Sherlock dips his head to get away from the intensity of John’s gaze, not sure if he’s being overcome with _shyness_ of all things, or something else entirely. “There wasn’t anything else I could be.”

“When we were at that crime scene earlier,” John starts.

“Yes. Jennifer Wilson. She had gotten to my flat only a few minutes before you did. Threw up on my stair rail, too, if you can believe it.”

John snorts a laugh. “I guess you’re asking me to believe a lot here, that’d probably be the least of it.”

Sherlock can’t help himself from asking. “Do you, though? Believe it?”

“Dunno,” he says, but his tone is light. At the very least, he doesn’t think Sherlock is certifiably insane, which Sherlock supposes is, on some level, a plus. “I think I’m just glad you didn’t tell me that you had a girlfriend.”

There’s a beat, and Sherlock cracks a smile. It’s obviously a move to buy himself some time, to give himself a moment to consider the incredible thing he’s just been told, but a _girlfriend?_ “That’s more unlikely than seeing dead people?” he asks.

John shrugs. “You seemed like perhaps girlfriends weren’t your area,” he says calmly, but Sherlock can hear the smile fighting to form on his mouth, can hear the laugh simmering behind his words.

Sherlock decides to throw it all into the wind. “They’re not, but it’s all right. I haven’t got a boyfriend either.”

“Just the ghosts?”

“Just the ghosts.”

There’s another long pause as the words settle in between them, and then they are laughing, half-snorted giggles that come up like coughs, inelegant and embarrassing with their shoulders pressed together hard, and Sherlock can tell that John isn’t sure yet whether to believe him, but he can also tell that John doesn’t _not_ believe him, and that’s fair, he supposes. Most days Sherlock isn’t even sure that he believes it himself.

Finally Sherlock gathers himself, and John’s giggles turn more into sighs, and together they turn their attention back to 22 Northumberland Street.

Where there’s a cab parked right in front of the door. “Look,” Sherlock says, already standing and moving forward. “What did I tell you? Only cab to stop there all night. Time to go!”

And when Sherlock looks back to see if John’s still with him, if John’s following him, he notices the cane—still hooked over the arm of the black metal bench at Angelo’s, totally forgotten.

*

Running next to John Watson makes Sherlock feel like he could run forever.

The city is a labyrinth, but somehow having John a step behind him makes the streets light up like a runway, vibrant in the violet night, and nothing seems easier than this: right turn, one-way, left turn, roadworks. He feels faster, he feels stronger, he feels like _more_ than he’s ever felt.

He feels invincible.

John is _following him_ , and it makes the city feel like magic.

He wishes they could just go through the buildings, or over them, instead of around, and a door opens right in front of them. He wishes they could fly, and a spiral staircase rises up out of the shadows to lead them to the roofs. London is _his_ tonight, with John by his side and at his heels, with steady stride and unquestioning faith that Sherlock will lead him to wherever they need to go, and Sherlock does.

They finally spill out of an alley and into the street, Sherlock’s momentum driving him forward and into the path of a cab, _the_ cab, which slams its brakes just as Sherlock slams himself into the bonnet. “Police,” he cries, hand diving into his pocket already for an ID he’d nicked off Lestrade, but as soon as he straightens himself up to make for the driver’s side door, the cab is off again, pedal to the floor and a wide grin flashing by out of the window as the driver speeds off toward the main road.

They’ll never catch up to him there, Sherlock thinks despairingly, but at least now they know they’re _right_ , and sooner or later they’ll have another chance.

He _wants_ to be caught, after all.

“I’ve got his cab number,” John says, panting. He laughs, breathes, and laughs again, incredulous and thrilled at once. “You just tried to get yourself run over by a serial killer.”

Sherlock  watches him, but John’s laughter is genuine and brilliant and appreciating. “It was worth a shot,” he grins.

John nods, trying to catch his breath. “What’s that?” He reaches, fingers brushing along the side of Sherlock’s hand, jolting electricity through him so that Sherlock neatly drops the ID into John’s hand. John giggles when he sees the name inside. “Detective Inspector Lestrade?”

“I pickpocket him when he’s annoying,” Sherlock says, the electricity from John’s hand lingering in his spine. “You can keep that if you like; I’ve got plenty more back at the flat.”

“You don’t look a thing like him, though,” John points out. He does pocket the ID card, but whether to keep it or to eventually return it to Lestrade, Sherlock don’t know.

“Pity, too. It’d be more useful if I did.”

John grins at him, the edge of something reckless just barely fitting into the curve of his mouth. “I don’t really think it’s a pity at all,” he says, and Sherlock’s body floods with a fresh surge of adrenalin, his spine sparking and glowing hot. “I think it’s a pretty lucky thing, you looking like. Well. The way you do.”

Christ. Sherlock needs to do something with this excess energy that isn’t snogging John Watson right in the middle of the street, and he needs to do it very quickly. He casts about for literally any other thing he can focus on, and sees a few bystanders looking at them and talking sternly into their mobiles. He nods toward them, but John already sees the issue that could be arising. “Got your breath back?”

“Ready when you are,” John says, and then they’re off again, running against the wind, running into the night.

*

By the time they reach Baker Street, they’re giggling and panting for breath, and Sherlock’s body is thrumming with his own insistent pulse. They barrel into the front entrance hall of 221, slamming the door closed behind them, and collapse against the wall at the bottom of the stairs, against each other, chests bursting and shaking with electricity and laughter. John’s shoulder is warm again, pressed into Sherlock’s, and Sherlock gulps at the air and tips his head back and closes his eyes, reveling in the heat of it.

“That,” John says, breathless, “was the craziest thing that I have ever done.”

“And you invaded Afghanistan,” Sherlock returns, and they both dissolve into laughter again. John’s giggle is high and maddening and Sherlock wants to _taste_ it, and John’s shoulder is bumping into his and John’s hand is _right there_ and when the giggles die away and John looks up, Sherlock looks back, and looks back, and looks back.

And John leans in.

John leans in and his breath is on Sherlock’s cheek, on his jaw, on his lips, and then John is there, heat and sound and the lingering chill of the night on John’s mouth, on his fingertips. Their mouths fit together, press together, pushing Sherlock back against the wall in a way that feels _held_ instead of _had,_ and John kisses him and Sherlock kisses him back and thinks, wonderingly, about what this would look like to anyone else, about how it _looks_ to be kissed by someone who could be a ghost, but it doesn’t matter because John is _warm_ and his hands are pressing and his chest, his breath, his hips, his _thighs_ , they’re all right there—

“You’re tan,” Sherlock says, between kisses that melt into his mouth like honey, like sunlight, breathless but it’s _important_ that he say it, that John knows it, it’s important because  Sherlock told him everything he could see, Sherlock told him and John is still here, and now he needs to know what Sherlock saw when he looked at him, he needs to know that Sherlock sees him too. “Your hands are tan but your wrists aren’t—somewhere sunny but not on holiday—your haircut is military, and you _stand_ ,” and he bites at John’s mouth, grabs at John’s shoulders, “you stand like a soldier, like you’re readying yourself for something.”

“Ready for you, maybe,” John gasps back, and he kisses Sherlock again, drowning out the rest of the deduction with his mouth, and his hands are on Sherlock’s neck and in Sherlock’s hair and pulling Sherlock’s arse closer, and closer, and—

Sherlock tips his head away, panting, and John follows the line of his neck with his lips, damp and hot. “You walked around Barts like you knew it, so you had reason to, probably trained there—but you were lost, couldn’t find the person you were looking for, so not recently then—your limp was bad when you walked but you _left your cane outside Angelo’s_ —” John steps in impossibly closer, groans a groan that reverberates through both their bodies and Sherlock’s spine is on overload, is sparking with fireworks and flame, is liquid gold inside his body and seeping through his ribs, his hips, into his groin— “And you’re fine, you’re fine, you’re _beautiful_ , it was just psychosomatic. Traumatic injury then, military, Barts, _suntan—_ Afghanistan or _Iraq_.”

His voice goes high on the end as John’s teeth finds the curve of his shoulder. “You said I needed to get out of my bedsit,” John says, and god, he’s _listening,_ he’s listening and he’s understanding and he’s _hard_ where he’s pressed tight against Sherlock and Sherlock’s hips stutter and shift and press back.

“You had a psychosomatic limp, of course you needed to get out of your bedsit,” Sherlock shudders, hauling John’s mouth back to his.

“You’re brilliant,” John says, smearing the word against Sherlock’s bottom lip, “you’re _extraordinary_ , quite extraordinary,” and Sherlock’s cheeks are hot and his hands are sweaty and his cock is _aching_ , and he thinks wildly that he’s never seen a ghost with an erection before, but that’s _wrong,_ it’s wrong, because John kisses like he’s _alive_ , like he’s desperate with how alive he is, like he’s brimming with it, like he’s overflowing with it, like his heart is crashing inside his ribs and his breath is building inside his lungs, like he’s straining and reaching and grabbing and he kisses, he _kisses,_ he kisses Sherlock like he can’t not be kissing Sherlock, like he’s holding his life in his hands and it’s _Sherlock_ that he’s finding in his palms, in his arms, against his lips and his tongue and his chest, and Sherlock takes his face in both his hands and kisses him back and tries to tell him _I’ve got you, I’ve got you, I’ve got you—_

“Oh, Sherlock,” someone who is very much not John Watson says. “What have you _done_?”

Sherlock freezes. John freezes.

Mrs Hudson’s hands flutter to her mouth, half-open in shock. Her eyes are filled with tears; her cheeks are ruddy pink with upset and surprise.

She looks right through John Watson.

*

 


	6. Chapter 6

Now there are  _definitely_ too many people in the flat.

Sherlock’s chest hurts, and he tells himself that it’s because there’s a mismatched and obviously unofficial squad of officers wandering around his belongings, fiddling with his papers and opening his moving boxes. His palms are sweating; the electricity in his spine is out of control, a lightning storm crackling from the base of his skull all the way down into his weak knees. He thinks, hysterically, that if Philip Anderson so much as _breathes_ onto his flatware, for god’s sake, he’ll have to bin the lot.

His unconventional—and also unofficial—group of flatmates has also returned to clutter up the corners, watching the proceedings with a vague sort of detachment. Jeffrey Patterson is making a sound at Lestrade through his mouthful of vomit that, if Sherlock had to guess, would be a demanding _do you know who I am_ ; Beth Davenport is crying again.

Sherlock doesn’t understand why they’re here. What makes a person stay, once they’re dead. Why anything matters in the after. Why they need answers so very badly, before they can move on, and it’s a question Sherlock’s thought a thousand times before but right now he’s choking on it. He’s choking on it. He can’t breathe.

John doesn’t follow Sherlock into the flat, and the distance between them feels like a lifetime.

He stands in parade rest, waiting by the door frame as though he’s not sure if he’s invited in. Sherlock feels like screaming at the sight of him—he wants John with him, beside him, always and forever, but he also wants to fold John away, to protect him from these insipid, intrusive, meaningless meddlers and all their breathing, beating humanity.

They don’t know what it is to be alive, Sherlock thinks petulantly, not really. It’s not fair. It’s not _fair_ that all these people get to live and live and live when John Watson is more alive than any of them, solid and warm and _pulsing_ against Sherlock’s lips and hands and hips. They don’t know and it’s not _fair_ , and it shouldn’t matter, and he wants them gone, all of them, he wants everyone to just leave so that he can look and look and look and look and _see_ John Watson for the rest of his life, and for the after of it too.

John kissed him, and it felt like resurrection, and the rest of it shouldn’t sodding matter.

He wishes it didn’t matter.

Sherlock shakes his head; he can’t think about it anymore or his chest will burst open right there onto the sitting room floor. He leaves John standing in the door and launches himself at Lestrade instead. “What’s all this?”

“I could be asking you that,” Lestrade answers with a grin, gesturing at all the moving boxes still stacked up around the flat. “I like your new place. Big improvement on that dump you were at in Montague Street before.” In the corner, Jeffrey Patterson snorts in apparent disagreement.

“Is that why your officers are swarming the place?” Sherlock demands, ignoring Patterson. John takes a few steps further into the sitting room so he can glare at all the intruders, and Sherlock loves him and hates him and it isn’t fair, and he has to look away again. “Am I having a housewarming I didn’t know about? You know the legal term for that is _break-in_.”

“It’s not a break-in,” Lestrade says, looking like the cat that’s got the cream and then some. “It’s a drugs bust!”

The pain in Sherlock’s chest plummets, sours in his stomach: oh, _no._

He whirls around to John, who has an incredulous look on his face. “A drugs bust?” John asks, with a dismissive little laugh that grates along the inside of Sherlock’s ribs. Somewhere in the flat, James Phillimore makes a noise of decided interest; Jeffrey Patterson makes a noise of decided disgust. “You’re not serious.”

“John,” Sherlock says, aiming for imperious and landing somewhere over by pleading, “shut up now.”

“Yeah, but—” John waves a hand carelessly, but then he looks at Sherlock’s face properly and nearly takes a step back. Sherlock can see the memory of what happened downstairs not two minutes ago flit across his face. “You?”

“Don’t say that,” Sherlock says before he can stop himself, and he despises the tone of his own voice. He clears his throat and starts again, this time with determination. “I’m—I _am_ clean, I have been clean. For more than a year now.”

“Is your flat?” Lestrade interrupts.

“I don’t even _smoke_ ,” Sherlock says, without turning back. He looks at John with all the _please believe me, please understand, please give me a chance_ he can muster. He repeats himself, softer. “I don’t even smoke.”

Surprisingly, John blushes, and then there’s a snort that turns into a laugh, a burst of a helpless little thing. “I know,” he says, licking his lips, and Sherlock blushes right up to the tops of his ears—the _taste,_ he remembers, the hot-wet-eager taste of John’s mouth. John knows he doesn’t smoke.

John leans in, putting a hand out to Sherlock’s forearm. “It’s all right,” he says. “We’ll talk about it later. Or we won’t. Whatever. But you’re all right.”

“Anyway,” Lestrade cuts back in, as though John hadn’t said a word—to him, probably, John hasn’t, and Sherlock’s stomach keeps crushing in on itself. “I knew you’d find the pink lady’s suitcase, Sherlock, I’m not stupid.”

“Jennifer Wilson,” Sherlock corrects automatically, turning back to him. “And whatever gave you _that_ idea? This is _childish_.”

“Well, I’m dealing with a child. Sherlock, this is _our_ case. I’m letting you in, against the rules, I might add, but you do _not_ go off on your own, understood?”

Sherlock opens his mouth to spit fire, because it’s _humiliating_ , to stand here being lectured while officers who undoubtedly wouldn’t even be here if they didn’t hate him rifle through his things, and they all lead such petty little lives and it’s not fair when someone like John Watson doesn’t get to live at all, and he’s not sure whether he’s furious or on the verge of tears, and—

Fingers, on his elbow—a whole palm, cupping, holding, grounding—the salt sweat heated smell of someone leaning in close—“The case, Sherlock,” John says to him. “Come on. You can solve this, and it’s more important than they are just now. Just ignore everything else.”

—and Sherlock breathes.

“Fine,” he says to Lestrade; Lestrade’s got a funny, wide-eyed look on his face, which Sherlock ignores. John’s right, and he _does_ want to solve this case, and he’ll need Lestrade’s resources if he’s going to keep working on it. There isn’t anything else he can do right now; there isn’t anything he can do about John or about death or about afterlives. He can only do this, this case and these dead and their lives, and he has to do it because he’s Sherlock Holmes, and that’s what Sherlock Holmes does: anything he can. And what he can do is to _see_ , and because he can see he can help. So that’s what he’ll do. “Fine. I found the case; did you find Rachel?”

Lestrade nods. His eyes flit over, like he’s looking at something in the space John occupies, and his wide-eyed look doesn’t quite fade. “Jennifer Wilson’s only daughter. Rachel.”

A daughter. A daughter’s name, scratched into the floor—a daughter’s Facebook profile picture, incongruously bright among Beth Davenport’s tiny eulogies. His mind picks up steam, dragging his reluctant heart along with it. “Good,” he says. “Might really be something there. Where is she? We need to talk to her, interview her. No— _I_ need to interview her.”

“Can’t,” Lestrade says. “She’s dead.”

Sherlock rocks back on his heels, his vision suddenly reeling into his mind and back out—half in the sitting room at 221B, half careening through his memories, people he’d known, ghosts he’d helped, looking for Rachel. “Excellent! How, when, why? There has to be a connection, there has to be _some—”_

“Not likely,” Lestrade cuts off his line of thought, “seeing as how she’s been dead for fourteen years. Rachel Wilson was Jennifer Wilson’s stillborn daughter.”

“No—no, that’s not right, that can’t be right. It’s too important for that to be right.”

From somewhere in the kitchen, Anderson scoffs loudly. “A dying woman remembering her dead daughter, that’s not important enough for you? No wonder they say you’re a psychopath, I’m seeing it now.”

“No,” Sherlock dismisses, breezing right past the insult just as John says, “Shut up, you arse,” and they both look at each other. Anderson makes a noise like a _hmph_ , and then, miraculously, shuts up and stalks back into the kitchen. An idea sprouts in Sherlock’s mind—a lighthouse, or a mirage?— _did Anderson hear him?_

John doesn’t notice anything amiss, at least. A smile curls over his face, and Sherlock wonders what it would look like if he leant in right now and kissed John Watson. What it would look like if John were really, truly _here_ —and what if he weren’t.

What it would look like if John stayed anyway. If John stayed, and was his, and was _there_ , always, with him, step-for-step, thought-for-thought.

Maybe it didn’t have to matter. Maybe it only mattered if they wanted it to.

He shakes himself free of the thought, tries to focus. “No,” he repeats. “Jennifer Wilson, she was clever, _really_ clever. She knew something had gone wrong and she left clues _deliberately;_ left her suitcase in the car, left her—” a shock of realisation comes over him. “Her _phone._ Don’t you see? Her smartphone? E-mail enabled, MP3 . . . _GPS_?” He looks around; a group of blank faces stare back at him. He wishes Jennifer Wilson were here to see it herself—no doubt she would be vomiting up over Lestrade’s shoes in sheer disdain at their ineptitude.

Then:

“Not a name,” John breathes. “Not a name at all—it’s a password.”

“Look in that suitcase, there was an organizer,” Sherlock says to Lestrade as he fumbles through a box for his laptop. “Her e-mail address was in it.”

“Not a very secure password,” Lestrade mutters, but he does it. “Jennie, that’s _i-e_ , dot pink, at mephone dot org dot uk.”  

Sherlock shifts a box or two and drops into a desk chair, opening the laptop. “She left her phone behind intentionally,” he explains as he boots up and navigates to the MePhone website. John watches over his shoulder, rubbing a smooth, distracting circle just above the collar of his shirt. Lestrade watches from over his other shoulder—he keeps both _his_ hands firmly in his pockets. Jeffrey Patterson and James Phillimore fill in the gaps around them, craning for a look.

“She knew when she got out of that cab that she was going to die, so she left her phone, she _planted_ it on him,” Sherlock explains. “He’s still got it, we know that, but to make it useful, _really useful_ , we need to be able to remotely access it. Which is where Rachel comes in.”

He types the name into the password field and hits enter. The website accepts it; Jennifer Wilson’s emails fill the page. It’s another click, two, three, and a clock fills the page, counting down from three minutes: _Locating,_ it says underneath. _Please wait._

They all wait. Watch. Sherlock only realises he’s holding his breath when John leans in a little closer and inhales right next to his ear, loudly and slowly, like a guide he intends Sherlock to follow. In, two, three; out, two three. In, two, three; out, two three.

“Breathe,” John says. “It’ll be fine.”

Sherlock breathes. Lestrade looks away, almost like he’s trying to give them some privacy. But he can’t see John—can he?

John’s hand tightens just a little on the back of his neck. In, two, three, four; out, two, three, four. “We’re going to need feet on the ground,” Sherlock says to Lestrade. “Cars. Can you get a helicopter? Her battery won’t last forever; we need to find it immediately.”

“What if he’s ditched it?” Lestrade asks, but he takes out his own mobile anyway and opens a new text.

“We know he didn’t,” John answers. Sherlock leans back into John’s warmth a little, closes his eyes; he’s got no idea if Lestrade will have heard him, but it doesn’t matter. Even if the cabbie _did_ ditch the phone—unlikely, since he still probably thinks Jennifer Wilson is alive—it would at least give them a starting point: somewhere he had definitely been. Somewhere he might be likely to return to, or revolve around.

The laptop blinks, makes a swooping sound, and the page reloads. There’s a small, flashing red dot on the screen where the phone is supposed to be. Sherlock looks for street names he recognises—there’s Marylebone Road, so the phone is—

“Here,” John says softly. “Sherlock—it says it’s here. In 221 Baker Street. How can that be?”

“Must’ve come up in that case after all,” Lestrade suggests, and he calls to his officers to start looking for a mobile. Behind Sherlock, John calls after him that no, it couldn’t have, that someone had called them from it. Lestrade doesn’t answer. He wonders if Lestrade will ever answer John Watson, or if that opportunity has passed.

Sherlock’s own mobile vibrates in his jacket pocket. Mycroft, probably, he thinks as he digs it out. Just one more thing he doesn’t want to deal with: snide, brotherly remarks about picking up new dead people and snogging them up against Mrs Hudson’s wallpaper.

But the text isn’t from Mycroft. It’s from a number marked _withheld_ , and it just says, _Come with me, Mr Holmes._

Standing on the landing, waiting just outside the door with a wide, sly smile and a pink mobile disappearing into his pocket, is a cabbie.

*

For a brief moment, everything stands perfectly still.

Sherlock meets the cabbie’s eyes—pale blue—bags underneath—worn tweed flat cap—frumpy cardigan, at least three years old, well-kept but ill-fitting—all superficial, nothing deeper, obviously intentional. The sort of person someone might work with for years, and only realise afterward that they hadn’t known him at all. An eerie, ghastly sort of wallflower: creeping and sneaking, skirting the light. Utterly poisonous.

And then Beth Davenport screams.

It’s a high, awkwardly vomit-clotted scream. She launches herself from the floor at the same time that James Phillimore falls off the end of the coffee table he’d been sitting in and tries to throw a wayward shoe, which of course he can’t pick up. Jeffrey Patterson stops babbling incoherently at Lestrade and instead begins shouting incoherently at the cabbie, vomit dribbling out of his mouth and down his tie.

As far as confirmations go, it’s an awfully strong one: they definitely recognise him, and they definitely hate him, and they’re definitely trying to show it.

It would probably be a terrifying sight, if anyone other than Sherlock could see it.

“John,” Sherlock says quietly, hoping that no one else will hear him as they all continue searching for the missing mobile. From across the room, John’s head lifts, like a dog with its ears pricked, and he turns to find Sherlock with a gesture: _me?_

Sherlock, nearly taken down by a surge of affection and warmth, nods.

John slides across the sitting room in a half-second, stepping in close—it reminds Sherlock of downstairs, of being pressed against the wall with John’s strength and John’s heat and John’s mouth—and determinedly does not look at the cabbie framed in the doorway. “That’s him,” John says.

It’s not a question, and Sherlock loves him for it. “I need five minutes.”

“No.” John’s head is shaking before Sherlock even finishes. “No. Nope.”

“I need to know _how_ ,” Sherlock insists, lowering his voice even more when Donovan looks over sharply, like she’s trying to listen in. “The victims—the ghosts. I need to be able to tell them _why_ they’re ghosts, John. I need to figure out how to send them on, don’t you see?”

“I need _you_ to not _become_ one of them,” John says.

It’s a veritable punch to the gut to hear that sudden desperation in John’s voice, to hear him begging for the same thing that Sherlock has been begging for since John Watson first stepped through a door into a lab at St Barts hospital, since John Watson first sparkled like a firework along Sherlock’s spine and surged against his skin, his hands, his lips: _please, God, let him live._

Sherlock takes a step back, a step toward the door, trying to escape the plea in John’s voice. “I have to,” he says helplessly. “I have to.”

John’s mouth twists with unhappy determination, and he retakes the steps Sherlock has taken and lifts onto the balls of his feet. “ _Two_ minutes,” he concedes, “and then I’m coming for you.” And he presses a kiss, hard, into the corner of Sherlock’s mouth.

When Sherlock turns away and melts quietly out the door, past the unheard, unseen ruckus of the dead, not one living person is looking toward the middle of the sitting room at John, like they hadn’t noticed him giving his insistent kiss.

Like there was no one for them to see anyway.

Sherlock takes a deep breath, and then takes the stairs two at a time, already counting down, _one minute and fifty-nine seconds, one minute and fifty-eight seconds,_ and realises he’s never had anybody to come after him before.

He takes the last few steps with a smile he can’t quite smother, and heads out into the night.

*

“Taxi for Sherlock Holmes.”

The cabbie waits patiently on the street, leaning up against the side of a black cab in an idle, unhurried way, as if he had not just expected but _known_ that Sherlock would be coming down from 221B by himself. The rest of the street is deserted and unsettlingly dark.

 _One minute forty-five,_ Sherlock counts, reassuring himself, _one minute forty-four, one minute forty-three._ “I didn’t order a taxi.”

“Doesn’t mean you don’t need one.” The cabbie smiles, a greasy, over-confident smile that runs like ice through Sherlock’s veins. “How about a ride, Mr Holmes? Might take you where you need to go.”

“Tell me,” Sherlock asks, instead of answering. “Which came first, the taxi driver or the serial killer? Though I suppose spending all day with the general public would be enough to set anyone off, wouldn’t it?”

“Been driving this cab, mm. Twenty-odd years,” the cabbie answers thoughtfully. “Seen just about everything, it’s true.”

He’s chillingly calm, Sherlock thinks, with a slick sort of veneer draped over him, like an oily curtain behind which something malignant is lurking. Every time Sherlock thinks he’s got a grip on the curtain to pull it back, the deduction slips off, the curtain slips away, and Sherlock’s left with no more than a gnarled uncertainty in his gut.

“But I’m no killer, Mr Holmes,” the cabbie goes on. “All I did was talk to those four people, and they killed themselves.”

Sherlock thinks back to John upstairs, on the fence between suicide and suicidal— _one minute nineteen, one eighteen, one seventeen._ “And what did you say to them?” _What would you have said to him?_ “Must’ve been good.”

The cabbie smiles again. “Would you really like to know?”

The ice radiating from the cabbie’s expression takes on a curious, sharp quality. Sherlock is suddenly reminded of polar bears feeding: the red, raw mess of prey as it smears over the snow and tundra of the Arctic. He resists the urge to look back at the windows of 221B to see if John is watching, but only just. _Fifty-eight, fifty-seven, fifty-six._ “You know I would.”

“Let me take you for a ride, then.” The cabbie tilts his head toward the backseat. “Fare’s on me tonight.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Oh, I’ll go quietly,” the cabbie assures him. “You call those coppers down here right now and I won’t put up a bit of fuss. I’ll confess and everything. But—” his smile widens, all teeth— “you’ll never know what I said. You’ll never know _how_ I did it.”

_Thirty-four, thirty-three, thirty-two._

Sherlock thinks.

He thinks about Jeffrey Patterson and James Phillimore, the two of them waiting for months with mouths full of vomit for a lead Sherlock couldn’t get to, furious and exhausted at not being able to so much as pick up a pencil to write down a clue. He thinks about Beth Davenport, and her face streaked with tears, fingers trembling over a pixelated image of her daughter’s face.

He thinks about Jennifer Wilson, and her urgency, her impatience, her rage—her stillborn daughter. The people she left behind and the people she’s moving on toward, once she can go.

He thinks about Mycroft, nearly twenty years in the waiting, who’s given up any hope of ever going anywhere.

He thinks about John. About John, and whether John is here or gone or elsewhere, whether John’s trapped in death or whether he’s still alive. About how John might have died, if he is dead—about where John might go, if he’s already on his way.

He thinks about John, and whether everyone goes to the same place, in the after. About whether the dead end up together.

_Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen._

He thinks about John.

_Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four._

He gets in the cab.

*

London streams past the windows, bright circus lights that seem dazzlingly incongruous to the tension in the cab. The cabbie doesn’t say where they’re going.

 _You’ve just gotten into the cab of a man who kills people he picks up in cabs,_ Sherlock thinks, trying to maintain his clarity even as his heartbeat ratchets up higher and higher. _He moves them out of the cab into some unfamiliar location without them causing a fuss. There’s poison; they take it themselves. It must be coercive, but not overtly violent._

_What will he do? What will I do?_

_What would John do?_

Sherlock glances at rear view mirror, checking the cabbie’s facial expression: neutral, of course. A London cabbie probably came by a good poker face honestly, after all. Underneath the mirror is his cabbie’s licence—with his photograph and the name _Jefferson Hope_ printed on it—and some kind of family photo with about a quarter of one end lopped off messily. Dull scissors to match his worn clothing, then.

Interesting, but hardly the most important thing to be getting on with. Sherlock takes out his mobile and opens a new text. If he needs to be prepared for anything, he needs to be prepared for _everything._

There’s no use in telling Mycroft what part of London they’re in, or the cab number, or that Jefferson Hope is a older-middle-aged white gentleman with sparse white hair, middling height with a bit of a paunch. If any of these things are worth knowing, Mycroft undoubtedly already knows them.

It’s not a question of what Sherlock could tell Mycroft anyway. It’s a question of what _Mycroft_ can tell _Sherlock_.

_Heard you met John Watson earlier tonight. - SH_

It’s not more than a beat before a response comes in. _Interesting fellow, isn’t he?_ \- _M_

“Won’t do you no good to tell anyone how to find you,” Hope interrupts. “Not where we’re going, anyway.”

 _Somewhere complicated then, with lots of rooms,_ Sherlock thinks. He ignores the threat and instead sends Mycroft another text. He might have been a bit embarrassed about the directness of it, in different circumstances, but seeing as how he’s in a taxi with a man who’s already killed four people, he thinks it can be forgiven.

_Is he dead or alive? - SH_

“Wondered if I might run into you. Never thought I’d do it literally, though.” Hope gives a little laugh; he’s nonchalant, but Sherlock thinks it’s a little forced—he’s trying to be distracting, unsettling. Sherlock’s determined for it not to work. “Sherlock Holmes, halfway on top of the bonnet of my car! Good thing I didn’t have a fare at the time. You might’ve gotten me then.”

_Haven’t you figured it out yet, Sherlock?  
Didn’t think you’d take this long. - M_

_It’s a matter of some importance,  
if you don’t mind. Dead, or alive? - SH_

The cab turns onto a deserted stretch of road and pulls to a stop in front of two identical buildings. “Here we are,” Hope says, an edge of irritation works its way into his voice—doesn’t like being ignored, then.

“Where’s _here_?” Sherlock asks, feigning obliviousness to buy time, waiting for Mycroft’s reply. Hope doesn’t fall for it. 

“You know exactly where this is, Mr Holmes.”

_To tell would be to spoil the fun. - M_

_Damnit Mycroft, this is important.  
I need to know now. - SH_

But Mycroft doesn’t answer, and then Jefferson Hope pulls open Sherlock’s door and levels a gun at him. “Pop out, here you go,” he says with a crooked grin.

Sherlock eyes the gun with disdain. “Oh, _dull_.”

“It gets better,” Hope promises, gesturing with the gun for Sherlock to get out of the car. Sherlock rolls his eyes, but he climbs out onto the street and lets Hope tell him where to go.

*

There are two pills in two bottles on the workbench between them, but Jefferson Hope isn’t terribly interested in talking about them. Unusual, Sherlock thinks, for a man who’s trying to kill someone with them.

“Sherlock Holmes,” Hope says, like he’s tasting Sherlock’s name in his mouth. It gives Sherlock the shudders. “Right here in the flesh. I’ve heard all about you, of course. You’ve got a fan, told me everything there is to know.”

Sherlock scoffs. “A _fan_?”

“Oh, sure,” Hope nods. “Reads your website. _The Science of Deduction_. Proper brilliant stuff, that is. ‘Course you don’t ever talk on there about what’s really special about you, do you?” He grins, slick and sly, like a small boy with a magnifying glass who’s just found an ant hill. “You don’t ever talk about what you can _see.”_

A scarlet bloom of fear opens in Sherlock’s gut. “I see everything,” he says, trying to keep his voice even around the rising dread. “It’s my job.”

Hope laughs and shakes his head. “Now, now, Mr Holmes. No lies here. It’s just you and me; there’s nothing to hide. You know what I mean.”

“I’m sure I don’t,” Sherlock says coldly.

Hope laughs and laughs and laughs, and the sound of it settles heavy like loose change in Sherlock’s chest. It doesn’t sound anything like the way John Watson sounds, and Sherlock wonders how long it’s been since his two minutes were up.  _John Watson, where are you_ _?_

“Haven’t you ever wondered what it’s like, Mr Holmes?” Hope asks as his laughter subsides. “I bet you know all about it, really. How it all works, all the fiddly bits no one even knows to expect before it’s their turn. Matter of fact, we should do an experiment about it. See what it’s all about. See just how much you know.”

Sherlock swallows. “See how much I know about what?”

Hope leans in across the workbench, his smile big and ugly. “About dying, Mr Holmes.”

*

“It’s dead simple,” Hope explains, that ugly grin growing wider still. “There’s a good bottle and a bad bottle. You pick the pill from the good bottle, and you’ll live; you pick the pill from the bad bottle, and you’ll die. You pick a bottle, and whichever one you pick, I’ll take the pill from the other one.”

“And you, of course, know which is which.”

“Course I do.”

“Why should I choose at all? There’s nothing in it for me. I could walk away from here right now and you’d still go to prison.” Sherlock stands to prove his point, even takes out his mobile, but Jefferson Hope only grins again. Sherlock wishes he’d stop doing that.

“You could,” Hope agrees amiably. “But you’d never know if you were right. And besides—” he pauses for dramatic effect— “just how long do you think John Watson will wait for you?”

Sherlock’s breath catches in his chest. “How do you know about John?”

It’s the wrong question to ask. Sherlock knows it as soon as he says it, and Hope knows it too: it leaves Sherlock too vulnerable, open and exposed, the shell of his fearless veneer cracked open to reveal the soft meat of him inside. Unfortunately, it seems Hope came armed with a lobster fork, ready to jab at the places he knows Sherlock can’t defend.

 _“_ I know what’s important to know about John Watson,” he says, practically gleeful underneath his smirk. “I know that he’s dead.”

The bloody gash of fear inside Sherlock’s belly opens to a gaping maw, and he finds himself sitting back down unexpectedly. “That’s a lie,” he says automatically. _He’s playing you_ , he repeats to himself. _He’s found your weak spot, and he’s using it against you_.

But Sherlock’s certainty has taken one too many blows already this evening: Lestrade, who hadn’t asked who John was or why he was with Sherlock at Jennifer Wilson’s crime scene, and Mrs Hudson, who’d looked right through John at the bottom of the stairs. Mycroft, who had always been too cautious of Sherlock’s heart, who had played at being big brother like it was something he could win at, who had refused to tell Sherlock what he wanted to hear.

_I know that he’s dead._

“Interesting man, John Watson,” Hope goes on, ignoring Sherlock’s blank shock. “I have to say, your fan wasn’t all that pleased. Couldn’t see the appeal. But I told him, I said, there’s no problem here, see, because Sherlock Holmes ain’t that kind of man to let a poor soul drag around unresolved, not if he can help it. No, I said, you’ll have to be sending him on his way soon, won’t you?” Hope’s smile turns predatory as he takes Sherlock in, his clenching hands, his trembling jaw. “You’re not the only one what sees things, Mr Holmes. And your _fan_ has been watching very closely.”

The deductions crashing through Sherlock’s mind don’t make sense. _Not the only one what sees things—you don’t ever talk about what you can see—watching very closely—how do you know about John Watson?_ The inevitable conclusion looms at the end of the string of information, but Sherlock can’t make himself reach for it. It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make sense because it’s _not possible._

Not even _Mycroft_ is really the same as Sherlock—he couldn’t see until after he’d died.

“Sounds like a creep,” Sherlock says off-handedly, hoping to press a button that would get him more information. “Is he dead, then? My fan. The one that told you all this, he must be dead.”

Hope laughs again. “Not at all. He’s just like you, Mr Holmes, alive and everything. He’s been looking forward to meeting you.”

Oh, and that’s a _good_ play, Sherlock thinks. That’s a power play if there ever was one, because that's exactly what he’s always wanted, exactly what he’s has always dismissed as fantastical impossibility: someone else who could see the dead. Someone else who knew the fear and the terror, who could see the gruesome world they lived in for what it was and who would know what it was like to live alongside death every day and sleep with it in his bed every night. Someone who would _understand._

Mycroft could never understand, not the way Sherlock needed him to. His horror wasn’t in living with the dead; it was in being dead with the living.

But Sherlock had never expected to find such a person, and especially not on the other side of a bloody serial killer. The irony doesn’t escape him, but it does, fortunately, strangle most of the temptation and the curiosity that Jefferson Hope was undoubtedly hoping to use against him. 

“Who is he?” Sherlock asks. “Charles Manson? Doesn’t seem like a Ted Bundy type.”

“There’s a name what no one says,” Hope answers easily, unperturbed. “I’m not going to say it either. That’s all you need to know about him. In this life, anyway.”

Sherlock changes tactics. “How do you come in, then? Why go through you, boring little cabbie, if he’s such a fan? Why not come to me directly? Why kill four people just to get my attention?”

Hope grins. “I didn’t kill those four people, Mr Holmes. ”I _outlived_ them.“

There: an in. Sherlock sits back. “Oh, _I_ see. This isn’t about my fan at all, is it? Not really. This is about _you_. Your death, not theirs. Clothes are all at least three years old, well-kept but ill-fitting; you’ve lost weight. You’ve got bags under your eyes. Not been sleeping well. You keep a picture of your kids in your cab but you’ve cut someone else out of the picture—their mother, probably. Bad divorce, then, if she’d died you’d have kept her in. She got the kids—you got the diagnosis.”

The smile on Hope’s face goes rickety and thin. “Aneurysm,” he admits, tapping his head. “Right in here. Every breath could be my last.”

“Dead man walking.”

“With a friend who sees the dead. Pretty neat, innit?”

“He’s promised you something, hasn’t he?” Sherlock realises suddenly. “A way out of death. He must’ve told you then—not everyone comes back. They move on. And you don’t want to move on, do you? You want to stay right here where you can watch your kids. Be closer to them, even—you’re not allowed to see them now, are you? But if you’re dead, you can’t be stopped. All you need is the certainty that you’ll stay here when your brain finally blows.”

Hope nods. “He’s been working on the answer, your fan has. Every life I take has got him closer to it.”

“And you don’t mind the game, because he thinks that violence is the key,” Sherlock theorises. “You put yourself in danger every time you offer this choice—” he gestures at the two pills— “because you think it’s the best chance you have of coming back.”

“Four people died and four people came back, Mr Holmes. That’s not chance, that’s statistics.”

“But you’re still not sure what really is the key to it, or you’d already be dead, wouldn’t you? Is it the violence? The surprise of it? If you just want it badly enough, will it happen? The fan, he doesn’t really know, and you don’t have enough faith in him to find out.”

“And there’s where you come in,” Hope agrees. “You and I play the game, and someone has to die, don’t they? And either way, it’ll be someone with a powerful motivation to come back, someone who knows it can be done.”

Sherlock shrugs. “Why should I come back? What if I don’t want to?”

“Oh, but you do.” Hope’s grin slowly spreads over his face again, wicked and full of teeth, and the fear Sherlock had almost forgotten under the puzzle suddenly surges in his gut again. “You want to come back for John Watson.”

 _John Watson is dead,_ Sherlock tries to say, but he can’t make himself. He doesn’t want to put voice to those words and make them true. The denial makes him feel childish and small, like a little boy pouting on the stairs of his parents’ house when he didn’t want something to happen that was going to happen anyway.

 _Probability says that he’s gone, brother mine,_ Mycroft’s voice sounds through Sherlock’s mind.

Sherlock shakes his head. _Improbable does not mean impossible._ Mycroft himself is proof of that. The fan, whoever he was, is proof of it.

That John Watson exists at all is proof of it.

But _probability_ can’t be entirely ignored, either, and Sherlock has to consider that John, despite everything, despite how badly Sherlock doesn’t want him to be, might really be dead.

And if he is, then John is _stuck_ , dead-but-not-really-dead, clinging to the awkward, unaware half-life of a person who hasn’t yet realised that he’s gone, unable to be seen and unwilling to see that he’s disappeared, waiting to realise something he doesn’t even know he’s waiting for.

Hope clears his throat, cutting through Sherlock’s thoughts. “It’s your choice, Mr Holmes. You can get up and walk out of here, send your John Watson on his way just like you’re meant to, never see him again. Or you can play the game, and come back for him so the two of you can move on together.” He laughs. “Or you can play and maybe I’ll die, and then at least you’ll have caught yourself a serial killer to make it all worthwhile.”

Sherlock looks at the two pills in their two bottles. _It’s a trap,_ he thinks. _It’s a lie. He’d have said John was dead no matter what, because it suits his game._

And yet—Jefferson Hope hasn’t given him any reason to think he’s lying about any of it. He’s admitted things no sane man would want to admit. He’s unquestionably let Sherlock into the inner workings of the game, into the motivations behind it. He’s implicated a third party—as good as told Sherlock that he’s being stalked, and the threat behind Hope’s manic grin was clear.

It wasn’t just a threat against him, either. It was a threat against John.

“What do you think?” Hope asks quietly, egging Sherlock on. “Play the game, Mr Holmes.”

Two bottles, then. Is there really a fifty/fifty chance, or does Hope have some kind of immunity to a common poison that he uses to trick the game? Would Hope—a man desperate to die, and too cowardly to do it himself—give a man the good bottle, hoping to tell himself it was out of his control, or would he give a man the bad bottle, eager to keep his safety net close?

Hope’s voice is quiet, encouraging. Daring. “What do you _really_ think? Can you beat me?” His head tilts to one side. “What do you think winning really is, in a game like this? Is it dying, and getting the chance to be with them forever? Or is it living, and losing them?”

Sherlock reaches for the pill closest to him, then changes his mind and grabs the one across the workbench, in front of Hope. The glass bottle is cool in his hand.

“Interesting,” Hope says. “What’s that one, then? Is it life, or is it death?”

The screw top of the bottle is a little stiff; it’s only been used the once. Sherlock shakes the pill out of its bottle and holds it up to the light. It’s fairly nondescript: clearly homemade, but not anything visibly unusual. By the look of it, it could be no more than a sleeping pill.

Hope is leaning forward hard across the workbench now, his own pill already held between two fingers, ready to go. “Is he dead,” Hope breathes, intense with anticipation. “Or is he alive?”

If Sherlock’s wrong—if Sherlock dies—will he be with John Watson, or without him?

 _Is he dead or alive_?

Sherlock breathes. Remembers the way John felt at the bottom of the stairs, holding Sherlock like it was _important_ , pressing into him like he was fragile and wanted, John’s hands on him careful but strong, pulling Sherlock to him like he _needed_ him, like he couldn’t breathe unless it was the air from Sherlock’s own lungs. Remembers the way John had watched him disappear down the stairs after a serial killer, counting out two minutes in caution and protectiveness, reluctant but understanding, willing to let Sherlock do what he needed to do but determined that Sherlock would not have to do it alone.

Sherlock doesn’t want to have to do it alone.

He puts the pill to his mouth, and—

—and there is a boom, and a crack, and a dull, meaty _thwap_ , and—

—the glass behind Sherlock shatters; he drops the pill in surprise. It rolls over the workbench, coming to a slow, gentle stop.

Hope makes a noise like all the air has suddenly gone out of him, and the smell of sweat and iron reverberates around them, and then Sherlock sees it: the red bloom of blood, unfurling like a flower in Hope’s breast pocket.

*

“What?” Sherlock says, dumbly.

Hope half-stumbles, half-falls out of his chair, as if stepping away from it will reverse time and draw the bullet out of his chest. He falls down to the floor, gasping for air, a death-rattle in his lungs already, and Sherlock is on his feet before he can think. There’s a hole in the window behind him—when he puts his eye to it, he sees that there’s a shattered pane in the window of the building opposite, too.

There’s no one there, though. Whoever it was—a cop? MI5? the _fan_?—they’re already gone.

He turns back to Hope, who’s already well on his way to dying on the floor. The pill Sherlock had dropped at the sound of the gunshot is still sitting on the workbench; he grabs it and slides over the bench to crouch in Hope’s face. “Which one is this?” he asks, brandishing the pill. “ _Which one_?”

Hope looks at him but doesn’t; it’s like his eyes won’t focus. The shot was too close to his heart; he’ll be dead in seconds, bleeding out onto the lino and taking all his knowledge with him: everything he knows about the someone else out there, the someone else who is like Sherlock, who sees what Sherlock sees. Who knows what Sherlock knows—who might know even more. Like what comes after, or how to force someone to move on.

Who threatens Sherlock into dying, and threatens the people around him, too.

Sherlock’s hands shake and shake, and his heart is in his throat. “Don’t die yet,” he orders, throwing down the pill—it’s no longer important. “Tell me about the fan. The one who told you what I can see. Tell me his name.”

Hope shakes his head, coughing weakly. He drags in a deep breath and then gasps. “No.”

“You’re _dying._ ” Sherlock feels like a blaze of fire, furious and towering and out of control. He needs that name. He _needs_ to know. There’s nothing he won’t do to protect John Watson, he thinks, and he plants his foot into the bloom of blood over Hope’s shoulder. “Give. Me. That. _Name!”_

Hope’s gasp of pain has an underlying gurgle to it now. Drowning in his own blood. Sherlock leans his weight a little harder onto Hope’s shoulder; he needs that name before Hope passes out and dies. “The name,” Sherlock insists. He’s shouting, but he doesn’t hear himself. “The _name!”_

Hope gasps and gasps and finally draws in his last breath and yells. “ _Moriarty_!”

Then he shudders, his body shaking its way through the last of the pain before everything goes still and heavy. The weight under Sherlock’s foot changes, almost imperceptibly but just enough: no longer straining, no longer working. It’s just blank, passive weight.

He’s dead.

“Don’t bother coming back,” Sherlock spits, chest heaving. His voice is frenzied, panicked even to his own ears, but he can’t stop himself. “Your kids won’t look at you even if you do.”

The room stays empty, though, just Sherlock and the dead body of Jefferson Hope, until the windows light up blue and red and the Metropolitan police come crashing through.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Strong TW in this chapter for discussion of suicide and suicide ideation.

“So you never saw any sign of the shooter, then?” Lestrade asks, a bit disbelievingly. 

Sherlock shakes his head, re-adjusting the orange blanket that’s been insistently draped over his shoulders in the back of the ambulance. He hates ambulances and paramedics both, hates the chemical smell of antiseptics, the cold white lights and colder hands. He wishes John were there to take care of him instead—not that he needs taken care of, because he’s fine and he doesn’t need coddling. It would just be  _nice_ _._ “They were already gone when I went to look.”

Lestrade sighs and looks back at the building. “Suppose a man like that would’ve had enemies. Could’ve just followed you, taken his shot when he had the chance.”

“No, the timing was too perfect,” Sherlock tells him. “The shooter waited until I was in immediate danger.”

“Protecting you, then?” Lestrade asks, eyebrows raised.

“Eager for the cabbie to be the one to die more than for me to survive, I think,” Sherlock says, scanning the crowd for possible suspects. “Either way, it says the shooter had a strong moral principle—only intervened when he had no other choice. Combined with the fact that the bullet they dug out of the wall was from a handgun—a kill shot from a handgun, over that distance _and_ through two windows?—no, with that kind of skill it’s an expert, not just a marksman, but a fighter. His hands would’ve had to be perfectly steady, so he can’t have been at all nervous or doubtful; he’d have to have been acclimatized to violence. It will have been a man probably with a history of military service—”

His eyes catch and hold: John Watson is standing at the edge of the police tape, parade rest, black jacket, hideous oatmeal jumper. Sherlock remembers how that jumper felt under his hands: like he needed to take it off John immediately—

“—and nerves of steel—”

John looks over and catches his gaze. He gives the slightest smile, just a hint of one, one that probably no one else looking at John would’ve been able to see, and then looks away again.

Sherlock finally trails off. Military history—parade rest—hands behind his back—nerves of steel—acclimatized to violence—army doctor—two minutes— _protecting Sherlock—_ “You know what? Ignore me.”

Lestrade looks over, surprised. “What?” His gaze starts to follow Sherlock’s; Sherlock looks away from the police line, but John has already disappeared back into the crowd.

“Ignore me. Ignore all of that, actually. It’s—it’s just the shock talking, or something.” He stands off the back of the ambulance and fights the orange blanket for a moment. “Excuse me, I just need to—saw someone I know, I think.”

“Hang on, I’ve still got questions for you!”

“Lestrade, I’ve just had a _very_ busy day of getting kidnapped by a serial killer, playing a game of chance for my life, and getting _shot at_ so if you don’t mind, I’d really like to just call it an evening.” He glares at Lestrade; Lestrade’s pretty impervious to his glares, but he _is_ awfully protective of Sherlock sometimes, and when the glare transforms the tiniest bit into pleading, he folds.

“Fine. You’ll come in tomorrow to get this mess all sorted, all right?”

Sherlock rolls his eyes and gives Lestrade the orange shock blanket. “Yes, fine. Evening, Inspector.”

*

John’s waiting for him at the corner across the street from the Roland Kerr Further Education College complex, leaning up against the wall of the building. “Sherlock Holmes,” he says, as Sherlock jogs over to him. “You’re in big bloody trouble.”

Sherlock stops a foot or so away. “ _I’m_ in trouble?”

“Yes, you are. Big trouble.” John shoves off the building and steps into Sherlock’s personal space. “ _Two minutes_ , I said. We agreed on _two minutes_. Not, jump in the cab and go for a jolly run around London. Not, almost get yourself killed by a man in a flat cap.”

“Almost doesn’t count,” Sherlock says. “Besides, I’m not the one that shot the man, so out of the two of us, I really think mine are the lesser sins.”

John’s nose twitches, like he’s daring Sherlock to arrest him for it. “Well,” he says slowly, when Sherlock doesn’t call for Scotland Yard, “he wasn’t a very good man, was he?” Sherlock pretends to consider it for a moment, then giggles; emboldened, John adds, “And frankly, he was a bloody awful cabbie.”

“He really was,” Sherlock agrees, and then John seems to loose his tenuous grasp on his patience and he presses up, presses a hard, angry kiss to Sherlock’s mouth, which immediately softens into something like being held, like John’s asking if he’s okay. “You’re a bloody madman,” John says, up against Sherlock’s skin. “You’re a bloody madman, and if you think I’m ever giving you two minutes alone with a serial killer again, you’ve got something else coming to you.”

He kisses Sherlock again, properly this time; his mouth is hot, and there’s a lingering acridity of fear on his tongue. Sherlock licks it away, but it reminds him that there are questions still to be answered—questions he can no longer avoiding asking. He’s put it off long enough, and John deserves better than this uncertainty. He deserves better than Sherlock trying to deny a truth that neither of them can hide from, better than worry and anxiety and reluctance. He kisses John one more time, and braces himself. 

“John,” Sherlock says, pulling away to look him in the eyes. He _seems_ so alive—if Sherlock met him again, right now, he doesn’t know if he’d even think of John as anything other than bright and vibrant and living, but for the zing and pop of electric sparks the run along the length of his spine and settle hotly along his neck, in his stomach. “John, listen to me.”

John’s brow furrows. “All right?”

“Yes. Well, I—there’s something I should have told you. I should have told you right away, right when we first met, but I really should have told you earlier, when we were talking about, um. About the things I see.”

“The whole you see dead people thing, you mean.”

Trust John to put it so bluntly, when Sherlock has spent years not saying it at all. It takes Sherlock’s breath away: John’s outright bravery in the face of the unknown, the way he approaches it as though it’s just another part of Sherlock, like the fact that he has curly hair or that he has flat feet. “You believe it, then? That I can see them?”

“I don’t know that I would have, except for the ghost in my flat. Bit hard to deny a thing can happen when it’s happening right in front of you.” _Mycroft_ , Sherlock thinks, suddenly realising, _you outrageous, meddling bastard. You did that on purpose._ “As it is, though—dunno. You’re so—I trust you.”

“So you’ll believe me if I say that I wouldn’t ask you this question if I didn’t absolutely have to.”

“Yeah,” John says, concerned rubbing Sherlock’s arm. “Hey. What’s going on? Are you all right?”

Sherlock nods, swallows past the fist in his throat, and asks, “Yeah. Are you?”

“’Course.” There’s a smile in John’s voice, concerned and small but unbearably fond. “’Course I’m all right.”

“No, I mean. Are you all right. Are you.” He clears his throat; something hot pricks at the back of his eyes when he opens them and sees John there, John’s smile and John’s cheeks, flushed a little against the cold. His hands hold Sherlock by the arms, thumbs moving in soothing circles, and he’s so beautiful it hurts Sherlock, deep somewhere in his chest. He’s here, and he’s looking at Sherlock with his eyes like that, and it _hurts_ for Sherlock to open his mouth and ask what he’s been trying not to ask since they first met yesterday— _God, was it only yesterday—_ but it can’t go on forever.

Sherlock closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. “What I mean to ask is: are you alive?”

John stares at him. “Um.” He huffs a shaky, awkward laugh. “I think so. Aren’t I?”

He can’t bear to look. “I’m not sure,” Sherlock admits softly. “When I first met you, I didn’t—I wasn’t—I couldn’t tell. Usually I can tell. The way someone feels. If it was—a visible death. I should be able to see it.”

“Well, shouldn’t I know?” John asks. “If I died, isn’t that something that you typically, you know. Go through?”

“Not really. I think—it’s one of those traumatic things. People tend to forget it. Or it happens so fast that they never realise it happened at all.”

John takes a step back, his hands falling from Sherlock’s arms; Sherlock shoves his own hands into his pockets so that he doesn’t reach out to pull him in again. “So I could be dead, right now?” he asks, an edge of something hard and alarmed in his voice. “Standing here? This whole time we’ve known each other, I could have been. I could have been dead? How can you tell?”

“It usually feels like a, um. A tingling, on the back of the neck. It’s cold, usually. But you—you’re all mixed signals. You light my spine up like a Christmas tree, but you’re so _warm,_ and I just . . .” he trails off, shrugs. Wishes he could pull his coat collar higher. “I just haven’t figured it out yet.”

“All right. Okay. Well.” John’s shoulders shift back; his chin rises, almost imperceptibly, as his tone turns brisk, and then it’s John Watson the Soldier standing in front of Sherlock, all angles and up-front confrontation. “Well. I guess we should find out for sure. How would we go about doing that?”

Watching John harden himself, watching him take the issue on directly, surprisingly makes Sherlock feel stronger himself. “Most dead, they can’t escape their cause of death. So if they’re shot, or stabbed, their wounds are visible. If they choke on something, it’s still in their throats. It doesn’t hurt,” he adds quickly, watching John’s eyes widen. “It just—sticks to them, a bit. So the question would become, if you died, how would you have died?”

John looks down at himself. “You’d have noticed if there was something physically wrong with me,” he says slowly.

Sherlock nods. He would have. “If you—” he doesn’t want to say it, but it’s an unavoidable reality, a possibility he has to consider— “If you were going to kill yourself, how would you do it?”

“You think I _killed myself_?” John’s obviously horrified, but there’s something else in his voice, too: guilt. Sherlock can’t stop himself from reaching out and taking one of John’s hands in his. John lets him.

“Are you really that surprised?” he asks gently.

There’s a long pause, and then John’s shoulders cave in a little. “No, not really. I guess I’m not.”

“So how would you do it?”

“Um. Shoot myself, I guess. Through the mouth, angled more up than back. Quickest way, less likely to miss.”

The tiny grin that wants to spread over Sherlock’s face is _entirely_ inappropriate, he knows. He struggles to tamp it down. “Having explored both the back on your head and the inside of your mouth,” he says, “I think we can safely rule that out.”

John smiles back, if only briefly. “Dunno then,” he says. “I had a prescription for sleeping pills, but I didn’t use them much. The dependency—not my favourite. I hadn’t filled my last supply.”

“Suppose you could have had a heart attack,” Sherlock suggests. “Or a stroke. Or some kind of infection.”

“You can’t see those, though.”

“No,” he agrees. “No. I’ll have to find a living person to see if they can see you too.” He looks around; there’s a fairly sizeable crowd gathering around the spectacle of police. It shouldn’t be that hard to find someone for John to try to talk to.

“What if they don’t see me,” John says slowly, “and I’m dead? What happens then?”

“Then I figure out why you’re still here, and what you need to do or to know in order to move on. When I figure that out, you’ll go.”

“Go where?”

Sherlock looks over at him. “I don’t know. No one has ever come back to tell me.”

“Can I choose not to go?”

“I don’t think so,” Sherlock shakes his head. “It’s hard to say until you know what it is you’re meant to know. If you have to do something—sometimes people have to tell someone something, for instance—I suppose you could refuse to do it. But sometimes it’s just something that you need to know yourself, and I wouldn’t know if that was the thing until I told it to you. It just depends on what you’re still here for.”

“What if . . . what if I’m still here for you?”

Sherlock’s train of thought stutters to a stop. He looks at John; John seems entirely earnest, his face eager and upturned, his shoulders drawn back as if ready for action. “What?”

John nods, like the more he thinks about it, the more convinced he is of the idea. “Yeah. Yeah, I think that could be right. What if I’m still here for you? To stop you—doing all that crazy stuff? Stop you from nearly getting killed by wayward cabbies, or whoever else? To help you with the cases? What if I’m here to protect you?” He hesitates. “To—you know. To love you, maybe.”

“You.” Sherlock stares. “You would want that? Even though I see ghosts? Even though you might be—you might be—”

John shrugs. “Didn’t have a hard time kissing you, did I? Suppose that’s up to you, though. If you thought you might be interested in kissing a dead person.”

“I don’t think it really matters whether you’re dead or alive,” Sherlock says finally. “I’m interested in kissing _you_.”

John smiles. “Then I’ll stay, as long as I can. Whether I’m dead or alive. If I’m alive, then even when I’m dead. If that’s all right.”

“That’s perfect,” Sherlock says, and then John has to kiss him before his eyes spill over.

*

“Lestrade—move, Sergeant—Lestrade!”

Lestrade looks up, silver hair shining in the blue of the police lights. “Sherlock, all right?”

“Yes, perfectly. I just have to, um. Ask you. A question. About earlier, when we were at 221B, there was someone with me, did you see him?”

Lestrade stares at Sherlock suspiciously, eyes narrowed. “What’s all this about?”

Sherlock huffs impatiently. “Just answer the question, Lestrade.”

“Well of course I can bloody well see him,” Lestrade says, almost in a shout, like he’s been stewing in this thought for hours and now it’s all coming out at once. “He’s right behind you right _now_ , and, mind you, I could _also_ see you across the street snogging his brains out, though I wish I really _couldn’t_ , and if you think you can do that sort of thing at my crime scenes now—”

Sherlock doesn’t hear the rest. He gives a quick shout of triumph, swings around and nearly falls in his excitement, and gathers John Watson up into his arms before he can utter a word, and kisses him soundly.

*

“Sherlock,” John says, pulling away. Sherlock kisses him again, swallows up the sound; John giggles but pulls away again, more insistently. “ _Sherlock_.”

“John,” Sherlock answers, pressing a kiss to his cheek since he’s denied John’s mouth.

“There’s a, um.” He giggles again. “A floating umbrella over there.”

That certainly catches Sherlock’s attention, but of course, when he turns to look, the umbrella isn’t floating at all—it’s grasped firmly in Mycroft’s hand, being held so that the tip is just an inch or two off the ground. Enough for someone who knows to look for it to see it, but not enough that someone who didn’t know couldn’t convince themselves their mind was playing tricks on them.

Sherlock’s nose wrinkles in distaste. “Of course,” he says sarcastically, leaving John on the pavement and striding over. “Of course he just has to come and stick his big nose in it.”

John follows him closely, asking _who_ has to stick his big nose in it, but Sherlock doesn’t answer. He doesn’t fancy having to introduce John to a man he can’t see nor hear; he _really_ doesn’t fancy having to introduce Mycroft to a man he was just snogging on the pavement.

“Ah, Sherlock,” Mycroft says on their approach. John, not having heard him, says hello to Mycroft’s clairvoyant where she waits a few steps away; she ignores him in favour of concentrating on Mycroft’s half of the conversation, even though Sherlock obviously doesn’t need a translator. “Another case cracked, I see.”

Sherlock ignores the greeting. “What are you doing here?”

“As ever,” Mycroft sniffs, “I’m only concerned for you.”

“So I’ve heard. It remains, _as ever_ , entirely unnecessary.”

And then Mycroft surprises him by tilting his head and studying him a moment. Studying John, too, and the space between them. He sets the umbrella down, leaning against the door of his big black car. He says, “I know.”

Sherlock blinks. “You know?”

“Do you know what he said to me?” Mycroft asks, nodding in John’s direction. “When I visited him in his little bedsit?”

“He said nothing. He told me so.”

“Did he now?” Mycroft smirks, but then he looks back at John Watson again, and his usual oily demeanor melts away, pretension and condescension giving way to something that could almost be kindness and _caring_ , the unusual way people look when they’re happy for someone else but sad for themselves at the same time.

“Why?” Sherlock asks, suspicious of that look. “What did he really say?”

For a moment, Mycroft doesn’t answer, but then his gaze slides back to Sherlock and the side of his mouth lifts in a truly genuine smile. “He pointed a gun at the air and said, ‘if you’re here for Sherlock Holmes, you’ll have to go through me first.’”

Sherlock’s heart skips a beat. “Oh.”

“Oh,” Mycroft agrees. They turn together to look at John again; John gives Sherlock a warm, hesitant grin alongside his questioning look; of course, he can only hear one half conversation.

“I think,” Sherlock says, suddenly feeling unaccountably shy, and he has to duck his head to complete his thought, “I think there’s something very. Very good. Happening. With that. With him.”

Mycroft hums. “There aren’t many things the dead know that the living don’t, Sherlock, but we do know a few.” Sherlock looks over; when Mycroft looks back, the sad-but-happy look has an edge of regret in it, of nostalgia. “Don’t wait. Don’t hesitate, not even for a second. Not when someone looks back at you like that. I have lived virtually alone for eighteen years, Sherlock, and have watched you spend those same eighteen years alone as well. And now here you have someone asking you to let them in. This is your chance. Don’t miss it.”

“Mycroft,” Sherlock says, his throat thick with unexpected remorse, but Mycroft shakes his head.

“That time has passed,” he says gently, then he clears his throat and his oily demeanor slides back into place, like it had never been gone. “Now go on—no doubt Doctor Watson is burning with curiosity.”

Sherlock grins. He beckons John forward, then leans over and hands Mycroft’s umbrella back to him. “John,” he says, gesturing to the floating umbrella, “This is my brother, Mycroft.”

John gapes, tries to look at the space Mycroft occupies and misses it by about two feet. “He’s your _brother?”_

“And the ghost in your flat,” Sherlock confirms. “He’s very sorry for being an arse about it, too. It won’t happen again, will it, Mycroft?”

The umbrella clatters to the ground. Sherlock turns to glare, but when he looks, Mycroft is gone.

*

“You know how else I know I’m alive,” John says, nudging Sherlock playfully in the arm as they walk back toward the main road, looking for another, hopefully less-murderous taxi.

Sherlock’s eyebrows waggle, seemingly of their own accord—he didn’t even know it could do that until just now. “I have a few ideas.”

John barks a laugh. “You’re incorrigible. As I was _going_ to say, _obviously_ , I’m starving.”

“For dinner?” Sherlock asks, perfectly innocent. “Or for something else?”

John laughs again, and shoves him, and by the time they get to the Chinese round the corner, they end up having to order it to go.

*

When they finally pull up outside Baker Street, Sherlock’s celebratory mood dips and quiets: Jennifer Wilson is waiting just outside the door.  _She should have moved on_ , Sherlock thinks, feeling a little bewildered and also a little guilty.  _I thought I'd solved it._ He shoos John into the house so they can talk, or mime, or whatever it is they'll have to do. “You go up,” he says, ushering John through the door. “I just have to—there’s someone here I have to talk to.”

John seems to understand immediately, scanning the pavement as though he might be able to see Sherlock’s visitor if only he looked hard enough. When he doesn’t find any hints as to who might be there, however, he gives in, gives Sherlock a kiss on the cheek, and heads upstairs.  

“Hello,” Sherlock says to Jennifer Wilson as he closes the front door behind John. “Solved your death. It was the cabbie. He’s been shot. Killed.”

She nods. Her face is utterly serious.

 “I thought you would have moved on,” Sherlock admits. “But there are other things we can try. Something you might need to tell someone, for instance? Your husband? A . . . lover?”

Jennifer shakes her head, a small grin forming on her face, and she takes Sherlock’s hand in one of hers. She looks different when she smiles. Warmer, somehow, even though her fingers are icy cold.

 _Thank you_ , she mouths to Sherlock, awkward around the vomit. _Thank you_.

She kisses his cheek, keeping her lips carefully closed together so as not to make a mess on him, then squeezes his hand one last time and takes off down the pavement. Sherlock, surprised, steps up onto the stoop to see her better as she gets farther away, to see where she might be going, but when he looks for her again, she’s already gone. Sherlock watches the street for a long minute, then goes inside, scrubs his cheek, and sits down to a quiet dinner with John Watson.

He never sees her, or Jeffrey Patterson, or James Phillimore, or Beth Davenport ever again. He couldn’t be more pleased.

*

“The one thing I don’t understand,” Sherlock muses, days later, taking a cup of tea from John with a kiss to John’s wrist, “is Mrs Hudson.”

“Mrs Hudson?” John takes the chair across from him and sips his own tea. The flat is quiet and sunny; all the dead are gone, and for now it’s just the two of them. It feels—unusually intimate, to be alone together. Without Jeffrey Patterson lurking in the corners, or James Phillimore draped over the furniture at odd angles, or even Beth Davenport’s quiet tears, it feels like a secret, stolen moment, somehow extravagantly private for two men in their own sitting room. “What’s to understand?”

“That night when we were—you know.” He stops, blushing pink, and clears his throat. John giggles. “You know. Anyway, when she came round to the bottom of the stairs, it was like she looked right through you. But I can’t understand why. She can obviously see you.”

John’s giggle grows into a brilliant laugh, his head tipping back and his eyes crinkling up deliciously with joy. Sherlock can tell it’s because he’s said something John thinks is particularly endearing, and even though he isn’t quite sure what it is yet, he doesn’t _feel_ laughed at. He never does, with John.

He feels adored.

“Sweetheart,” John says, once he’s got his breath back. “Your dear motherly landlady walked in on you practically being had by a stranger up against her wall. Where were you _expecting_ her to look?”

Sherlock blinks. Blinks again. Then he answers, as primly as he can manage, “I _suppose_ that’s something to consider,” before they both dissolve into laughter.

He never thought, when he first started seeing the dead, that life could be like this: giggling and daylight and the electric pulse of life, feet tangled up with someone else’s. And it’s easy, and it’s comfortable, and Sherlock has to put down his tea and get out of his chair and into John’s before the moment passes.

“Oh, hello,” John says, catching Sherlock by the hips and pulling him sideways into his lap, steadying Sherlock’s bum on one thigh. He grins up at Sherlock with an inordinately pleased look; _Sherlock’s_ is so inordinately pleased he has to look the other way until it mellows. “You seem awfully happy this afternoon.”

“Do I not usually seem happy?”

John doesn’t answer right away. He watches Sherlock carefully, still with that fond smile but a little more sober, and then he hauls Sherlock in a little closer. “Have you seen Mycroft again?” he asks quietly.

Sherlock shakes his head, leans into John’s chest a little harder. “No,” he answers, playing with one of John’s hands instead of looking him in the face. “He finally went and got on with his life, it seems. Or death. Depending on how you look at it.”

“I’m sorry.” John rubs little circles into his lower back and kisses his temple. “I’m sorry you’re missing him.”

“No, don’t be. He waited long enough.” Sherlock sighs, and puts on an exaggerated face of despair. “I’m sure they’re missing him down at MI5, though. It would be just like Mycroft to start a war _after_ his death, just to spite me. Snarls up the traffic, you know.”

John isn’t fooled by the bravado, though, and he curls a hand over the back of Sherlock’s neck protectively, nudging at Sherlock’s forehead with his nose until he looks up and their foreheads rest together. “He’ll be all right. And so will you.”

There’s nothing really to say to that, so Sherlock doesn’t try. He kisses John instead, slow and soft, and lets the comfort of safe and close and _loved_ sink down into his bones, lets it close over his misery and put it to rest.

“Love you,” Sherlock says, against John’s mouth. “I love you, love you, love you.”

John kisses the words out of his mouth, repeats them back with presses, with grazes, with brushes and givings and takings and the kiss deepens, and deepens, from _loved_ straight through to _wanted_ , all-encompassing. Sherlock feels the tug of the corner of John’s mouth against his as it curls into another smile. “If we have any dearly departed visitors,” John says, murmuring against Sherlock’s neck, “I think now would be the time for them to vacate the premises.”

There are no ghosts in the flat—at least, none that Sherlock knows of at present, but he supposes he never really counts out the possibility of surprise—but it’s much more fun to tease. “Mm, Doctor Watson, you’re not interested in an audience?”

“Not this time,” John says, slipping one hand up under the back of Sherlock’s shirt to stroke along the sensitive skin that dips over the small of his back, that stretches over his ribs. “Can they hear me? The ghosts. When I talk, I mean.”

Sherlock rolls his eyes and nips back at John’s jaw, huffing out an exasperated laugh at the same time. “Of course they can hear you,” he says, and he kisses the nipped spot to soothe it, presses just the very, very tip of his tongue to it. “You’re alive; anyone can hear you. You’re very—” another kiss to John’s jaw— “very—” a kiss to the corner of John’s mouth— “very—” a breath, hesitating over John’s lips— “ _alive._ ”

The kiss lands, soft and then hard and then messy, Sherlock trying to get impossibly closer into a space that John’s chair simply can’t spare, half-standing on one foot and kissing John, being kissed by John like they’re both playing for England and determined to win, the both of them giggling and exploring and seeking and laughing and teasing at once. They nearly fall out of the chair in the ensuing struggle—closer and warmer and deeper and harder and finally Sherlock’s patience runs out and he tugs John up to his feet and flush against him, leading him forward to the sofa, step by aligned step.

“Ghosts!” John calls, his voice going shrill with a laugh as Sherlock tackles him down to the cushions in a flail of limb and shirt buttons. “Clear out!”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to Amy @toxicsemicolon and Leslie @hudders-and-hiddles for the beautiful betas, and my sincere apologies to Leslie for ignoring her about the commas. <3 
> 
> Find me on [tumblr!](http://www.watsonshoneybee.tumblr.com)


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